[throwaway425933]

It baffles me that US supreme court justices can be given "progressive" vs "conservatives" labels. Aren't they expected to be impartial?

Even in a country like India with weaker rule of law, the courts and judges never take sides with political parties.

[rootusrootus]

Everything in the US, whether it should be or not, is divided at some level along ideological lines. It's awful. I hope we can find our way out of it while retaining a healthy, functioning democracy. And I don't think it's inaccurate to say that when the US suffers this way, it has an impact on the whole world. We can play a stabilizing role, but only when we are ourselves stable.

It may be rose colored glasses, but I don't remember it always being this way. Maybe it was right about the time Bork got nominated, but as I recall confirmation hearings used to be more of a rubber stamp. The president picked someone halfway decent, the Senate said sure that looks good, and there we go. But now it's completely ideological and the actual qualifications and judicial attitude of the nominee have practically no impact.

Doesn't help that some of the current justices believe strongly in originalism, which gives wide latitude towards interpreting what the founders must have been thinking.

And it really doesn't help that some of the justices are engaging in overtly partisan behavior in their off time. Used to be that the mere appearance of impropriety could sink your career, but that ship sailed a while ago.

[0xBDB]

This probably won't be popular, but the U.S. Supreme Court isn't really partisan either. A lot of its cases don't involve partisan issues in any case, but a majority of all the cases are decided 9-0, like this one.

The perception that the court is partisan comes from a lot of press attention on a very small number of 5-4 cases on controversial issues where the majority has clearly used motivated reasoning. That was the case in both Roe v. Wade and the case that overturned it, Dobbs, for example. On the current court some justices are particularly notable for doing this (in my opinion Alito on the right and Sotomayor on the left).

But even in 5-4 cases the justices don't always split the way you'd think. The Bostock County decision that made gays and transgender people a federally protected class against job discrimination was written by a conservative justice. That same justice, Gorsuch, as known as an advocate of Native American treaty rights. The late Justice Scalia was an advocate of defendants' rights under the Fourth Amendment. The judges aren't predictable voters in the way senators are.

[rossdavidh]

Well, they should be impartial (and really compared to Congress or the White House they most definitely are), but they are appointed by the President (partisan) and approved (or not) by the Senate (partisan), so everyone knows which side they stand on. Not good, but it is how it is.

[o11c]

The founding fathers sucked at math, and accidentally made political partisanship mandatory in the constitution.

Just because it's not explicitly stated doesn't mean it's not forced.

[verdverm]

Expectations vs reality w.r.t. US SCOTUS being overly political is a hotly debated topic of late.