MORNING GLORY: The Supreme Court officially closes the books on another term
What the left has said
Inferred left“Court's consensus numbers mask high-stakes rulings shaping rights and policy”
Left-leaning coverage of the Court's term tends to treat aggregate consensus statistics with skepticism, arguing that the cases where the conservative supermajority did split from the liberal justices carried outsized consequences for civil rights, regulatory power, and democratic accountability. The fact that Roberts and Kavanaugh each appeared in the majority 95 percent of the time reads, in this framing, less as evidence of harmony and more as a measure of how dominant the Court's conservative bloc has become. When you control the outcomes, you can afford to agree on the easy ones. Progressive legal commentators typically foreground the specific decisions that curtailed agency authority, restricted voting rights protections, or narrowed access to legal remedies, arguing that raw consensus rates obscure who bears the cost of those rulings. Advocates warn that a Court appearing moderate by the numbers can still be transformative in effect.
What the right says
Right“SCOTUS term shows Roberts Court finding broad agreement, defying partisan caricature”
Fox News framed the term's low rate of ideological splits as a rebuke to the narrative that the Supreme Court is simply a partisan institution in robes. The 95 percent majority-agreement rates for Roberts and Kavanaugh fit neatly into a right-leaning argument that the conservative justices are applying law rather than ideology, reaching consensus with colleagues across the bench far more often than critics acknowledge. In this telling, the handful of high-profile 6-3 decisions were principled applications of constitutional text, not political maneuvers, and the broader term record backs that up. Right-leaning commentary tends to highlight the Court's legitimacy and its role as a check on executive and regulatory overreach, framing a consensus-heavy term as evidence that originalist jurisprudence produces coherent, broadly acceptable results rather than the extremism its opponents allege.