Thread by @MikeSacksEsq

Every once in a SCOTUS justice picks one of their side's ideological issues over another, sometimes--but not always--to the benefit of the opposite side's preferred result.

Here's what the six conservative justices put at the top of their lists:

Roberts, with rare exception, puts his standing hawkishness over his substantive agenda. Proof: his first-ever solo dissent today was against an Evangelical Christian college student arguing a free speech violation; his vote in the Prop 8 case to the benefit of SSM in CA.

(Top of my head, Roberts rare exception assuming standing when he otherwise may not have: the Fisher affirmative action cases)

Once upon a time, you could count Thomas's putting the conservative substantive agenda over conservative judicial restraint. But now his view is orthodox conservative.

Thomas does every long time altogether junk his commitment to the conservative substantive agenda to strike out at pre-Civil Rights Era symbols of racist terror (cross burning, Confederate flag license plates) that he'd prob uphold if subject matter was anything else at all

Alito refuses to execute abstract conservative priorities in cases that trigger his bone-deep law-and-order impulses (see, e.g., Comstock, Gundy, Snyder v. Phelps)

Gorsuch places a formalist, wooden textualism/originalism above any conservative substantive agenda (Bostock, Haymond)

Kavanaugh? He hasn't yet really stepped out to choose one principle over another. I guess there's his support for the Batson line of cases, but that's all he's shown so far, and that's more a general heresy that now kinda isn't, so ehhhh?

Barrett, in her short time on the bench, has given one significant data point: she chose a death row inmate's religious liberty/freedom/rights over letting the state kill him. supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf…

(Alito and/or Gorsuch gave Barrett and the liberals the fifth vote in that case, but we don't know why because neither man wrote or even put his name on any opinion)

Anyway, I find these individuals' intra-ideological priorities fascinating and revealing.

And back to Roberts as the Court's chief standing hawk - today's solo dissent really solidified what I before had thought was a still somewhat contingent principle

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