The culture war is consuming the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court is far more focused on cultural political issues such as religion, guns, LGBTQ rights, and abortion than it was in the recent past. The current Court is hearing more than twice as many cases that touch on these issues than it did during the Obama administration. There are several reasons why, including the justices’ own interest in cultural politics, the fact that right-leaning lawyers are more likely to bring lawsuits seeking to change the law when they have a friendly Court, and the fact that the justices have made so many recent changes to the law that they often have to clarify how their new legal rules work. The Supreme Court for much of the last several decades has been a fairly technocratic body. The Court, to be sure, has handed down its share of historic cases: Case names like Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Roe v. Wade (1973) are familiar to most Americans, but such highly political and culturally salient cases have historically made up only a small percentage of the Court’s work. One way that the Court has changed is that the current panel of nine justices appears to be fixated on culture war issues such as religion, guns, LGBTQ issues, and abortion. Though these four issues do not exhaust the many cultural divides that drive much of US politics, they capture many of the Republican Party’s current cultural grievances. And the current Court, which has a 6-3 Republican majority, now hears more than twice as many cases touching on these four issues than it did during, say, the Obama presidency. During those eight years under President Barack Obama, the Court heard a dozen cases that focused on those issues. By contrast, in the five Supreme Court terms that began with Republicans controlling six votes on the Court (2021-present), it has heard 18 cases that focus on these issues. That works out to 3.6 cases per Supreme Court term, compared to 1.5 under Obama. This is true even as the number of cases heard by the justices has been in steady decline since the 1980s . When Chief Justice John Roberts was a young attorney in the Reagan White House, he once quipped that it is reassuring that “ the court can only hear roughly 150 cases each term .” But the Court hasn’t heard anywhere near that number for years . In its 2024-25 term the Supreme Court decided just 62 cases that received full briefing and an oral argument. So the justices are hearing more and more politically charged cases, even as their overall workload declines. The Court’s growing interest in cultural politics won’t surprise anyone who has paid close attention to the Court. In the last few years, the Court’s Republican majority appears to have been going down a checklist - identifying 20th-century precedents that are out of favor within the GOP, and overruling those decisions. This is the period when the Court abolished the constitutional right to an abortion,...

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