Quote Originally Posted by Gelatinous Cube View Post
Since FDR the SCOTUS has become partisan and almost croney-ish. I understand that's a subjective thing to say, but it seems founded when you can look at SCOTUS and know beforehand that they'll split among partisan lines instead of being a separate body of wisdom. It undermines the checks and balances, IMO. I'd prefer open political brawls to having a bunch of justices that are only too eager to please the party that appointed them. Then again, maybe they were appointed because the politicians knew beforehand that they were predictable (Roberts).
You might find this interesting:

http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/06/ev...ourt-is-wrong/

Start with the Court's ideological divide. Although some cases are decided five to four, that’s less than twenty percent of the cases this Term. Roughly half the decisions are nine to zero. Only slightly more than one in ten cases involved the narrow liberal-conservative divide (fewer, if we don't include cases in which we presume Justice Sotomayor would have voted with the left had she not been recused).

Though the Term ended (as it often does) with decisions decided along ideological lines, other five-to-four decisions that intuitively might have been decided on an ideological basis during the course of the Term were instead resolved by totally unpredictable alignments. For example, the Court in Dolan v. United States broadly read judges' power to order restitution (a "conservative" outcome) by a majority of Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Alito, and Sotomayor, over the dissent of Roberts, Stevens, Scalia, and Kennedy. (This was the exceptionally rare case of the five most junior Justices joining together against all their senior colleagues.) Then Magwood v. Patterson broadly permitted a habeas corpus petitioner who prevails in a habeas petition to bring a new challenge to his subsequent sentence (a "liberal" result) in an opinion by Thomas (!) joined by Scalia, Stevens, Breyer, and Sotomayor, over the dissent of Roberts, Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Alito. Thomas also wrote the defendant-favoring opinion construing the Speedy Trial Act in Bloate v. United States, over the dissent of Justices Alito and Breyer. In Shady Grove Orthopedic Associates v. Allstate Insurance Co., the Court held that state law cannot block federal class actions (a pro-plaintiff result) in an opinion by Justice Scalia (!) joined by Roberts, Stevens, Thomas, and Sotomayor, over the dissent of Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Alito.
And anyway, if there is a "conservative vs liberal" split involving how to interpret the constitution (orginalism etc), the problem is not "partisanship" but one side being wrong about how to interpret the constitution.