[rurp]

Oh to live in such a world... Unfortunately the Supreme Court is not a compiler that returns rulings from some objective process. The justices have massive leeway to decide how to interpret every part of the constitution, and they do so to align their rulings with their own personal and political goals. If we swapped this court with 9 other judges they would return very different rulings on the exact same cases.

[mrkstu]

In this instance though, the majority's 'political goals' are textualism and originalism- where the intent of the written words is paramount. This at least has the virtue of limiting the power of their unelected personal policy outcomes- which we see much more often with the putative conservatives voting with the liberals against their presumed personal opinions on what they'd like the outcome to be.

You see that quite often from Gorsuch and Alito- you'll not once see that from Sotomayor.

Thomas is consistent, though conveniently for him his policy and political preference's and how he reads the Constitution seem to align nearly perfectly.

[eropple]

Gorsuch I'll give you as, while intensely conservative, probably pretty honest about it, but Alito is a whole-cloth mythmaker on his own in the vein of a Scalia. He's about as much of a "textualist" as Thomas is, and both will search for any wild port in a storm (see Dobbs itself for plenty of them) to get to the point he wanted to get to.