The Supreme Court’s political divide is at its widest point in decades, with the rate of ideologically split cases more than doubling this term compared to the average rate since 2005.
The court last month ended a politically fraught term marked by surprisingly public—and at times personal—disputes between the liberal and conservative justices.
Just days before the term concluded on June 30, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor signaled her staunch disapproval of one of the conservative majority’s decisions by reading her dissent from the bench, prompting an outburst from her ultra-conservative colleague Justice Samuel Alito that shocked veteran court watchers.
The justices’ increasingly tense interactions come as more cases have been decided along ideological lines, according to data compiled by SCOTUSblog.
During the 2025-26 term, the six conservative justices voted together as an ideological coalition against the three liberal justices in 22.7 percent of cases, according to SCOTUSblog.
That’s compared with just 10 percent of cases decided along ideological lines between 2005 and 2024.
The most recent term was dominated by President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda, with the conservative justices backing the president in 84 percent of cases as of March, according to the legal watchdog group Court Accountability .
A YouGov poll released this month found that Americans largely disapproved of the court’s increasingly politicized decision-making, with many respondents saying the court’s decisions this term have given Trump too much power.
Overall, 50 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the way the Supreme Court is handling its job, compared with just 36 percent who approved.
Nearly half—or 45 percent—said recent decisions had given the president too much power, compared with 29 percent who said the president had been given the right amount of power and 9 percent who said he’d been given too little power.
Among MAGA Republicans, 25 percent said the president had been given too little power.
Sotomayor, 72, in particular has penned scathing dissents—and hasn’t been shy about repeating her criticisms during interviews.
After the court allowed Alabama to adopt new congressional maps that multiple lower courts had held were unconstitutional, she blasted her conservative colleagues for “disregarding both democratic values and the rule of law.”
And in the most pointed show of disapproval open to justices, she read aloud her dissent, warning that “more people will die” after the majority allowed the Trump administration to turn back asylum seekers at the border.
The dissent invoked the Holocaust and lamented that the majority had “regrettably and tragically extinguish[ed] the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”
Her reading caused Alito, 76, who wrote the majority opinion, to shoot back, “There’s much I would have added if I had known a dissent would be read from the bench,” in what CNN’s chief Supreme Court analyst called “a very bitter response.”
Carolyn Shapiro, the co-director of the Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States, told the Financial Times that it wasn’t the first sign the justices were having trouble getting along.
“Given how fast and how destructive of tradition, precedent, [and] practice the court’s actions have been for the majority, it’s not surprising… that emotions are probably running high on both sides,” she said of the court’s political divide.
In April, Sotomayor took the highly unusual step of apologizing to conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh after she suggested that his ruling allowing immigration agents to question people based on their ethnicity, language, or place of employment was out of touch with reality.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Supreme Court for comment.
