Is the Supreme Court Really Partisan and Unethical?
What the Media Deliberately Misrepresents
The media would have you believe the Supreme Court is simply the Republican Party in robes. The reality is far more nuanced—and more important.
Every time the Court issues a major ruling, headlines scream about “conservative victories” and “liberal defeats.” The 6-3 majority is portrayed as a partisan gerrymander. Justices are reduced to their appointing president’s party affiliation. The message is clear: the Court is just politics by another name.
But that narrative doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Here’s what the media deliberately misrepresents: judicial philosophy is not the same as partisan politics. The conservative justices aren’t ruling based on what helps Republicans win elections. They’re applying a coherent, principled approach to constitutional interpretation—one that predates and transcends current political battles.
The Justices’ Credentials
Before dismissing the Court as partisan, consider the qualifications of its members. Every current justice is exceptionally credentialed:
Eight graduated from Harvard or Yale Law School. One graduated first in her class from Notre Dame Law School. All but one served as federal appellate judges before joining the Supreme Court, spending years writing judicial opinions and interpreting law. Several clerked for Supreme Court justices, taught at top law schools, or served in senior government legal positions.
These aren’t political operatives handed robes as favors. They are among the most accomplished legal minds in the country. Chief Justice Roberts argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court. Justice Sotomayor served as both a trial and appellate judge. Justice Gorsuch earned degrees from Harvard and Oxford. Justice Jackson worked as a public defender—experience almost no other justice has brought to the Court.
The confirmation process, despite its political theater, still requires demonstrating deep knowledge of constitutional law, legal precedent, and judicial reasoning. Every current justice cleared that bar convincingly.
When we call these jurists “partisan hacks,” we’re not critiquing their qualifications—we’re attacking their judicial philosophy because we dislike where it leads. That’s a different argument entirely.
Understanding Judicial Conservatism
Conservative justices largely embrace originalism and textualism: interpret the Constitution according to its original public meaning, read statutes by their plain text, and defer to elected branches on policy questions. This isn’t a secret Republican strategy—it’s a legitimate theory about how unelected judges should function in a democracy.
This philosophy leads to outcomes that happen to align with Republican policy preferences, but the reasoning matters. When the Court overturned Roe v. Wade, conservative justices weren’t declaring abortion immoral or enacting a Republican platform. They were concluding that the Constitution doesn’t address abortion, and therefore the question belongs with elected state legislatures—not nine lawyers in Washington.
You can vehemently disagree with that conclusion on policy grounds. But disagreement isn’t evidence of partisanship.
The Rules Are Clear
Let’s be blunt: Congress can pass laws. The Constitution can be amended. Those are the rules.
Not the rules we wish we had. Not rules that need judicial workarounds. The actual rules of American democracy.
If Americans want nationwide abortion protections, there’s a path: win elections, gain Congressional majorities, pass a federal law. If we want same-sex marriage constitutionally guaranteed, there’s a process: convince 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of state legislatures to amend the Constitution. We’ve amended it 27 times—to end slavery, grant women’s suffrage, establish civil rights. It’s hard. It requires broad consensus. That’s the point.
The Supreme Court’s job is not to bypass these rules because we find them inconvenient. Nine unelected justices with lifetime appointments are not supposed to impose policies that elected representatives won’t or can’t pass. That’s not interpretation—that’s legislation.
A Hard Truth About Roe
Let’s say it plainly: Roe v. Wade was very wrong. Not because abortion should be illegal, but because seven justices had no constitutional authority to invent a right that appears nowhere in the text, then impose it nationwide with a detailed trimester framework that looked more like a statute than a judicial opinion. That’s not interpretation—that’s lawmaking. And courts don’t make laws. Congress does.
Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, no conservative, criticized Roe’s reasoning. She understood what many refuse to acknowledge: the decision was constitutionally indefensible, went too far too fast, and short-circuited the democratic process. It stopped the organic liberalization of abortion laws happening in state legislatures and created a decades-long backlash.
Worse, it made abortion rights fragile. A court-created right was always vulnerable to a different Court—which is exactly what happened. If abortion rights had been won through legislation and democratic persuasion, they would be far more durable today.
How Democrats Politicized the Court
Democrats bear significant responsibility for turning judicial confirmations into partisan warfare. They insisted that nominees defend Roe v. Wade, a constitutionally indefensible decision, and treated the Supreme Court as their legislative insurance policy when they couldn’t win in Congress.
They demanded that justices pledge allegiance to specific policy outcomes rather than to faithful interpretation of law. They turned confirmations into referendums on abortion policy. Anyone who questioned Roe’s reasoning—even on legitimate constitutional grounds—was deemed unacceptable. They asked justices to be politicians, not judges.
This corrupted the entire institution. It made the Court nakedly political, escalated confirmation wars, and undermined the Court’s legitimacy. Republicans responded with their own hardball tactics—blocking Merrick Garland’s nomination entirely and rushing Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation weeks before an election. Both parties now treat the Court as a prize to be captured rather than an institution to be respected. And it failed: Roe was overturned anyway, because judicial shortcuts are never as secure as democratic victories.
Selective Outrage in a Corrupt Swamp
Let’s address the recent, relentless focus on the ethics of the Supreme Court, particularly its conservative justices. The media has seized on stories of undisclosed gifts or flag-flying as “proof” that the Court is a corrupt arm of the Republican party.
This is a disingenuous political attack, not a serious ethical critique, and the hypocrisy is staggering.
Washington D.C. is a “swamp” in the truest sense of the word, yet the media and political class express selective outrage. They are silent on the systemic, legalized corruption that defines the other two branches:
The Revolving Door: Members of Congress, their staffers, and executive branch officials openly use their time in “public service” to build a network, which they immediately “cash in on” by leaving for multimillion-dollar lobbying jobs. They literally write the laws and regulations, then get paid by corporations to help them find the loopholes. This is a routine, accepted conflict of interest that dwarfs any fishing trip.
Executive Branch Enrichment: Presidents and cabinet officials leave office and immediately become multimillionaires through book deals worth tens of millions, speaking fees of hundreds of thousands per appearance, corporate board positions, and consulting arrangements. They leverage relationships built in office and knowledge of policy decisions to enrich themselves spectacularly. This isn’t occasional—it’s the expected career path.
Congressional Conflicts: Members of Congress, who have direct influence over every industry, are still permitted to trade individual stocks. The STOCK Act, which was meant to prevent them from trading on insider information, is famously weak and rarely enforced. They oversee committees on banking, healthcare, and defense while holding financial stakes in those very industries.
Lobbying and Access: The entire business of Washington runs on a pay-to-play system where wealthy special interests bundle campaign donations to buy access to lawmakers—the very lawmakers who then write the laws that favor those interests.
This is the daily, structural, and accepted corruption in Washington.
The goal of this sudden media obsession with Supreme Court ethics is not to promote good governance—it’s to delegitimize a Court whose judicial philosophy they despise.
They are not angry about “ethics”; they are angry that the Court is no longer their legislative backstop. They are angry about Dobbs. So, they manufacture a crisis of “corruption” to pressure the Court and slander the justices who are following the law instead of their preferred political agenda. It is an attempt to intimidate and delegitimize the one branch of government that is actually rejecting politics and returning to its constitutional role.
Why This Matters
Some have grown impatient with democracy. Congressional dysfunction, the filibuster, and political polarization make legislation feel impossible. When people are suffering now, “wait for Congress” feels inadequate. So courts are asked to create rights that can’t be won democratically.
But this shortcut has poisoned everything. Every Supreme Court vacancy feels existential because nine justices have been made responsible for deciding abortion, guns, healthcare, marriage, and every other major policy question. Confirmation hearings have devolved into bloodsport. We talk about court-packing and term limits. The institution’s legitimacy crumbles.
The conservative justices are saying: follow the rules. Use the democratic process. Build coalitions. Pass laws. Amend the Constitution if necessary. Don’t ask us to be your unelected legislature.
That’s not partisanship. That’s constitutionalism.
The Media’s Narrative
The media frames every decision through a political lens because that’s what drives engagement and fits the story their audiences expect. “Conservatives rule against EPA regulations” sounds partisan. “Court rules agency exceeded statutory authority under separation of powers doctrine” sounds boring—but it’s often more accurate.
When justices cross ideological lines—Gorsuch siding with LGBTQ plaintiffs on statutory interpretation, Roberts preserving DACA or Obamacare—it barely registers. These don’t fit the “partisan hack” narrative, so they’re dismissed as anomalies rather than evidence of principled judging.
The media needs villains and drama. Explaining nuanced constitutional philosophy doesn’t get clicks. So we get simplistic scorekeeping that obscures what’s actually happening.
The Path Forward
Those who disagree with this Court’s outcomes can acknowledge that these are serious jurists applying a coherent constitutional philosophy, not partisan operatives in robes.
The alternative—demanding that courts impose preferred policy outcomes—is intellectually dishonest and strategically foolish. It delegitimizes the judiciary, circumvents democracy, and produces rights that evaporate when the Court’s composition changes.
If we want durable policy victories, we need to win them the right way: through elections and legislation. We need to persuade our fellow citizens, build coalitions, and pass laws. We need to respect federalism where it allows states to serve as policy laboratories. And yes, we need to accept that democracy is frustratingly, maddeningly slow.
Congress can pass laws. The Constitution can be amended. Those are the rules. The Supreme Court isn’t partisan for insisting we follow them. It’s doing its job.
It’s time the rest of us did ours: win the democratic battles instead of asking judges to fight them for us.