Just because the conservative block in the supreme court didn’t deliver every victory the right wanted does mean the court was more moderate this term.
Just because the conservative block in the supreme court didn’t deliver every victory the right wanted does mean the court was more moderate this term.
Even the decisions that aren’t horrible on their face generally contain language within the opinions that essentially tells conservatives how to do it “right” next time (“right” = get the results they want).
In Moore v. Harper, yeah, they could’ve ended democracy as we know it and chose not to. But in the majority opinion, Roberts basically said, “The plaintiffs went too far in asking us to endorse ISL, but if they’d just asked us to rule whether the NC Supreme Court went too far in its reading of state law, we would’ve gone their way.” He also went out of his way to cite a precedent that says states can assign their electoral votes by House district if their state constitution doesn’t prohibit it. For states that went electorally blue in 2020 but have gerrymandered-for-Republicans congressional districts (AZ and GA at a minimum), this would take states where Biden won a majority of individual votes, and give most of their electoral votes to the Republicans instead.
Roberts is playing the long game.