Supreme Injustice
Stone found no such consistency in votes of the five most conservative justices in the 20 major cases. The pattern of their decisions cannot, he argued, be explained by either of the two major intellectual themes of conservative legal thinking, judicial restraint and originalism.
“Something is motivating them other than a completely neutral detachment. They chose to be activist in certain types of areas, and strike down law when laws disadvantage the wealthy,” Stone said in my telephone conversation with him. The conservative majority takes “an aggressive, muscular approach” in striking down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but then “suddenly becomes very passive in deferring to the legislature in the voter ID case.”