This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

As the Supreme Court wrapped up its term last June, USA Today ran an op-ed entitled, “Do you think the Supreme Court is partisan? Well you’re wrong.” It was quite serious, apparently a defense of the Supreme Court by a conservative columnist, Dace Potas, distinguishing between the justices’ chosen right-wing philosophy, which does not change direction with a new president’s party, and a partisanship Potas denies, that acts just to empower the MAGA president. 

The assertion that, while the justices may be conservative, they are not out to help Trump, specifically, is, in fact, a common view among a certain strain of opinion writer. The Wall Street Journal editorial board points to the Court’s skepticism of Trump’s tariffs to insist arguments “that the Court is tolerating an Imperial Trump Presidency” are “mistaken.” Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg argued in 2024 that the Court’s decision that year to rule 9-0 against a group of anti-abortion doctors who were seeking an FDA crackdown on the abortion drug mifepristone was proof that the Court was neither as “partisan” nor as “ideological” as the American public at large. (The Court found that the doctors lacked standing, but not necessarily that they were wrong on the merits.) “The popular partisan narrative for the Supreme Court gives a very narrow view of how the justices’ ideologies actually play out in practice,” wrote Potas in USA Today. “Americans should look to the justices’ own personal tendencies and judicial philosophy to characterize them, rather than simply grouping them by party.” 

It’s a view that is willfully naive, as 2025 made abundantly clear. Yes, on the merits docket, the justices did not rule along partisan lines, 6-3, every single time (though they did quite a bit). Yet it’s not the merits docket where their partisanship shines through. It’s on the emergency docket — often, appropriately, called the shadow docket — where the conservative majority’s partisanship most aggressively asserted itself, allowing Trump to enact his unprecedented attacks on the federal government, the separation of powers, individual rights, and even Supreme Court precedent virtually unimpeded.

Consider a distinction between “ideological” and “partisan.” Much of the time in recent decades, the Court has been “ideological” in the normal sense of the term — a consistent judicial philosophy of questions that stays constant between terms of presidencies of different parties — of late, a Court with a majority of right-wing ideologues consistently doing things like overruling Roe v. Wade, knocking down campaign finance laws, striking down gun laws, and so on. But, if one asked the question, “was the Court partisan?” — meaning it conveniently changed its judicial logic depending on which party was in power, or in other words, working, beyond ideology, to promote (or defeat) a particular political agenda — that was not necessarily so. For example, during the COVID........

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