Jimmy Hoover, Supreme Court editor-at-large for Law360, joins Cheddar Politics to recap the Supreme Court's first full term with an emboldened 6-3 conservative majority.

Cheddar Politics

Emboldened Conservative Supreme Court Majority Wraps Up First Full Term

and welcome back everyone to gender politics of baker machado in new york, we've reached the end of the current Supreme Court term and ask the justices head to their summer break and they're plumb professorships at foreign universities. We've not been left with a pile of decisions on abortion, gun rights, climate policy and religion in public life, showing a very emboldened conservative majority that's reshaping the law in its image. So joining us now to break it all down is jimmy hoover, Supreme Court Editor at large for Law 3 60 jimmy. Always good to have you here in your perspective. So look, big picture here. What do you sort of think? We've learned about this new conservative dominated court over the course of this term? We've learned that it is not shy about making a splash. So in what is Justice Amy coney Barrett's first full term on the court where she's kind of had the ability to help set the court's agenda for the term. In terms of which cases to take up, we have a Supreme Court that is overturned roe versus wade in the 50 year old constitutional right to abortion, that has expanded Second Amendment rights to outside the home and jeopardized gun control legislation in states across the country that has further expanded the free exercise clause and the claims of religious litigants about anti religious discrimination and as of this morning, that has hampered the federal government's ability to regulate against things like climate change. So this is a court that is pretty aggressive, I think you could fairly make that argument, um in terms of bringing the law in a more conservative direction without as much consideration to things like precedent. So that's kind of where we're at. Okay, I'm glad you said aggressive because I totally agree with you because chief Justice john roberts known for sort of incremental changes when it comes to launch two policy here, the Supreme Court. I'm sorry, the abortion issue interesting also because he didn't, he didn't basically side with the conservative majority in overturning roe versus wade. So at the end of the day, where does sort of chief justice roberts sort of hold on to basically, his title is the chief justice here. Does he have any have any power anymore with this very aggressive conservative majority now? Well, chief Justice roberts really only enjoyed a temporary kind of moment in the sun when he was the actual median justice for the overwhelming majority of of his career. He has not really been the key player in a lot of these big cases, you know, back when Kennedy was on the court, um he was the swing vote again, you know, before Barrett joined the court, uh roberts had the ability to kind of command a 45 justice majority with Justice Ginsburg's being the of course the fourth liberal there, but now, you know, he's once again receded kind of into the background a lot of these cases, you know, so he often times is joining already with his conservative colleagues to form a 6 to 3 majority, but what you're seeing is only in rare cases is he actually able to move the needle. And that was certainly the case in the Dobbs abortion ruling, where he is the fourth dissenter. And I should say that he kind of concurred in the judgment of the case. So if if we if we go back to that actual case, he would have said that Mississippi's law should stand, that was a 15 week abortion ban. So even in his view of the of the universe, you know, that law which banned abortions after 15 weeks and was unconstitutional under the roads viability framework, he would have kind of, you know, really taken like a hammer to the viability framework set out, and he was just saying that he wouldn't have gone so far and he would have preferred a more moderate course to just scaling back row as opposed to kind of throwing uh the whole thing out the window. And that just really goes to show the dynamics and what you can accomplish when you have what is effectively a 6 to 3 supermajority of conservative justices, you can afford to lose one vote, you can afford to lose a chief justice roberts and still prevail and make this big splash in the law. So that's where we're at jimmy hoover Supreme Court editor at large of lot 3 60 we love having him on, we're gonna try to get him on later on.