Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux at 538:
We looked at two separate analyses of her record on the court this month, and we found whether it was in regular opinions or in special en banc decisions in which the entire appeals court ruled together, she was consistently on the right-most edge — if not the most conservative judge on the bench. And she was especially likely to rule in a conservative direction on civil rights issues.
Those findings underscore the idea that Barrett is likely to be a reliable conservative vote on the court. And her confirmation is even more significant because she’s replacing one of the court’s stalwart liberals. If Barrett ends up being ideologically similar to Justice Samuel Alito, who is currently the second-most conservative justice on the Supreme Court, her replacement of Ginsburg could be one of the biggest ideological swings in modern court history.
In this scenario, Justice Brett Kavanaugh would replace Roberts as the court’s new median justice, which could lead to a significant rightward turn on the court, as Roberts is often the lone conservative justice to side with the liberals. He has cast several recent pivotal votes with the liberals, too, including a dispute in which the justices deadlocked 4-4 on whether to halt a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision that allowed state officials to count ballots that arrive up to three days late. With Barrett on the court, though, Roberts would lose that “swing justice” role.
In the short term, that means election-related cases could have very different outcomes — even including a new iteration of the Pennsylvania case, which Republican officials recently brought back to the court. And in the long term, conservative legal advocates may respond by bringing even more ambitious cases, questioning long-held precedents.
Kavanaugh is a partisan hack so whatever he’s doing must be seen in that light. If he has voted with liberals once in a while it is purely to position him as a “swing” justice so that he can really own the libs when the time comes.
He showed his hand last night with the Wisconsin opinion in which he cited Bush vs Gore (which he worked on) and made it clear that he’ll eagerly do whatever legally intellectual gyrations are necessary if the result might give Trump a win.
I have no doubt that Coney Barrett will join him, as will Thomas and Alito. So we are dependent upon those allegedly fair-minded jurists, John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch.
God help us.