Some cases cause unpredictable partisan splits at U.S. Supreme Court
Most people can describe an ideological division on the Supreme Court. Five justices on one side, four justices on the other How presidential candidates will address the Supreme Court, and who they might nominate, has been a regular campaign topic for decades. But not all 5-4 cases are decided by the 5-4 divide you might think.
One recent example is Mont v. United States—a case heard in the current term concerning a pause in an inmate’s supervised release from prison. The court affirmed the ruling of the 6th Circuit in holding that a "term of supervised release does not run during any period in which the person is imprisoned in connection with a conviction for a . . . crime unless the imprisonment is for a period of less than 30 consecutive days."
The court issued its opinion in the case last week by a 5-4 vote. Justice Thomas authored the decision and was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Ginsburg, Alito, and Kavanaugh. Justice Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Gorsuch.
Jonathan Adler, writing at Reason.com, described the alignment of justices in the Mont decision as "unprecedented." He wrote, “The resulting division is thus neither one we expect to see ideologically, nor is it readily explained on the basis of other common jurisprudential divisions, such as the formalist-pragmatist split we've often seen in other criminal justice contexts. Further, while we've seen Justice Gorsuch cross over to vote with the liberal justices in other cases, we have not seen this in a case in which one of the more liberal justices also 'switched sides.'"
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