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I like your writeup.
Hypothesis for your latter observation: there are more conservative justices, appointed over a longer period. I wouldn't be surprised if they have more competition between viewpoints.
But then, I do tend to take weird splits like Campos-Chaves v. Garland as evidence against partisan capture. I want to believe that Court is better modeled as a club of weirdo turbo-lawyers. They obviously aren't immune to mainstream politics, but they play with a rather different set of incentives.
"Weirdo turbo-lawyers" is exactly how I view most of the Justices, with the exception of a few who seem reliably partisan (Alito on the right, Sotomayor on the left; maybe Jackson as well, but it's too early to tell). Thomas in particular holds so many idiosyncratic views at odds with the rest of the Court that he seems like a sort of mad genius: he loves to write these audacious solo opinions confidently attacking well-established precedents, but I often find myself thinking "damn ... he might be right!" after reading them. (For example, he consistently argues that the Establishment Clause is not incorporated against the States; in other words, the Constitution does not bar States from establishing a State religion--see Section II of this opinion). There has been a lot of scrutiny lately over Thomas receiving gifts from Republican donors, with pundits suggesting they were bribes for voting a certain way. Maybe, but Thomas's opinions seem way too weird, and at the same time too carefully-thought-out, to be insincere. And if I was a billionaire trying to buy votes, I wouldn't bother with Thomas--Empirical SCOTUS has a "Justice Power Index," and Thomas is consistently on the bottom because he so rarely agrees with the rest of the Court.
Jackson's starting to have her own windmills to tilt at: the anti-Munsingswear solo dissents and concurrences, and while they have obvious political ramifications (tactically mooting a case after receiving a favorable injunction in lower courts is mostly useful for current progressive goals, if only because SCOTUS demonstratably isn't going to wait before slapping down the 5th Circuit), it's at least a meaningful position with not-crazy-partisan political underpinning. She's not a Thomas or Gorsuch on that (yet!), but it took a few years for Thomas, at least, to grow into it.
I don't like the position, and maybe it's not enough to pull her from the 'reliably' partisan, but not an obvious thing either.
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If I were a rich man trying to keep the flyer a particular way, I might try to find a SCOTUS justice so he doesn’t start thinking “maybe I retire in order to make some real money.”
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Among whom Gorsuch prides himself on being the most idiosyncratic weirdo.
I think so too. Textualists are supposed to care about the meaning of the statutory language, without worrying too much about "legislative intent." But Gorsuch, sometimes, takes this principal so far that he seems to enjoy finding a perversely-literal interpretation of a statute which everyone agrees the legislature could not have intended. Bostock is the clearest example IMO: according to Gorsuch, the Civil Rights Act's prohibition of sex discrimination also unambiguously prohibits employers from discriminating against homosexual and transgender employees (of both sexes), despite the fact that (in the words of Judge Posner) "the Congress that enacted [the Act] would not have accepted" that interpretation. In fact, Congress had already considered and rejected a proposed amendment to the Civil Rights Act that would have extended its protection to "sexual orientation and gender identity," and (Alito points out in dissent) "until 2017, every single Court of Appeals to consider the question" rejected Gorsuch's reading of the text. According to Gorsuch, treating men and women equally is not important; the Civil Rights Act apparently requires men and women to be treated exactly the same, to the point that you can't fire a male employee for wearing womens' clothing (it's important to note that Gorsuch's reasoning here would apply to all male employees, regardless of their "gender identity."). So, can an employer take action against a male employee--who identifies as a man--who insists on using the women's bathroom? Wouldn't firing that employee be motivated, in part, by the employee's sex, according to Gorsuch's rule? Yet Gorsuch refuses to engage with this inescapable extension of his reasoning, lamely announcing that those cases "are not before us ... we do not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind."
So Gorsuch, one of the more reliable conservative votes, has on at least one occasion handed a huge culture war victory to the left because (in my uncharitable opinion) he thought it would be impressive to discover a "counterintuitive" reading of the statute. The reason Congress and all those appellate courts didn't interpret the statute the same way is that they just weren't smart enough to find the "unambiguous" meaning of Title VII, unlike the eagle-eyed textualist Gorsuch. Then he refuses to even consider the obvious import of his holding on nearly-identical culture war issues, like sex-segregated bathrooms and changing rooms, because--again--he's one of those elite compartmentalizing textualists who consider only the issues before them, and who are not swayed by irrelevant appeals to unlitigated issues and public policy concerns.
This turned into more of a rant than I intended, but I do think it supports the argument of some right-wingers that "thoughtful" conservative Justices can be a liability, since it only takes a couple of them to side with the defect-bot liberals and inflict huge damage on the right.
I like it! This is excellent elaboration on the shorter summary of the court I had back at the beginning of the year. I think the model I lay out there continues to work pretty well with what we're seeing in rulings, particularly in the two split decisions from Friday. In Campos, I'm sure Gorsuch was very excited to contemplate the possibility of a conjunctive "or".
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One part that I'd add is that we don't really have any such examples of a Gorsuch opinion that's bizarre textual literalism that benefits the right or part of its allegiances.
Maybe he'll prove me wrong -- Williams v. Kincaid in the 4th Circuit is kinda an anti-matter Bostock, where there's absolutely no question that the explicit ADA statute excludes a wide array of sexuality and gender-related stuff, and lower federal courts have decided that Congress must have really 'intended' for this exception to not apply for a wide array of sexuality and gender-related stuff.
Wouldn't put money on it, though.
Perfect example of the use of institutional capture. Congress excludes "gender identity disorders". The (captured) APA drops "gender identity disorders" and replaces them with "gender dysphoria", and the Fourth Circuit says "Oh, that's totes different".
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Just like rationalists. The biggest problem with rationalist reasoning is the refusal to sanity-check ther results of arguments. Rationalists will draw absurd conclusions like insect welfare or donating one's kidney to a stranger and say "sure, I guess that's right" rather than figuring out that something has gone wrong with their reasoning process if it produces such an absurd result. See also: terrorists who fail at epistemic learned helplessness.
Public policy concerns isn't quite the right way to describe it. That makes it sound like some sort of legislation by reinterpretation like the left does. If the people who created the law wouldn't have wanted the public policy implications of your interpretation of the law, that's a failure to sanity check, that's not public policy in the sense of "I am deliberately inerpreting the law to bring about this public policy".
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