FishBlaster comments

Well then! Are things worse for the formerly unemployed? The North Koreans? Small business owners? Entrepreneurs who actually create all the jobs? Genuinely curious, not trolling here. There is a tendency to ascribe progress and backslide in these areas to Obama and Trump, respectively.

Ha, got me there! And no doubt fueling Trump's ire here.

Lol. Roberts strikes me more as a minimalist: rulings as narrowly defined as possible, which tend to fall on either side of the knife's edge now and then (though he had nothing on Kennedy in that regard).

Toasted, easy: Roberts is a never-Trumper, and now, admittedly so. They are all over the legislature too. I did point out that he is an outlier in some of his rulings. This doesn't buck the overally trend though. Judges side with the appointing party politics at least 66% of the time.

Nishikat, Roberts was appointed by Bush. My point was not so much about his politics but his idealism about what the judiciary is. I agree with him on what it should be, but we have different ideas about how it's currently used.

How so? Judges are, as the authors claim, basically "politicians in robes." An Obama appointed judge will vote how Obama wants him to, the vast majority of the time. Same goes for Trump judges. He is just playing the game as it has been played, and slowly winning, by making all these appointments. Roberts is an outlier; this doesn't disprove the overall trend.

Previous... attempts? Sorry i guess i am lacking some crucial context. Do commenters have a tendency to flake out on this board or something? The NYT reporting on this years ago, in case you didn't read it, which is pretty clear:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/us/judges-rulings-follow-partisan-lines.html

Spoiler alert: this trend hasn't changed. As the authors point out, if the judges didn't vote on partisan lines, we wouldn't have these confirmation battles in the first place.

My point is that canards like "conspiracy theory!" and "orange man bad!" are lost against actual data from authors like Epstein, Landes and Posner, and studies like that linked above pretty much call Roberts out for the blinded idealist that he is. The guy is not dealing in reality.

Hiroshi Abe may need to find somebody else to smile for!

Y'all can prattle on about Trump tantrums and project your TDS onto us, but fact is that Roberts is simply wrong on this point. Painfully, obliviously, and so maliciously wrong that this couldn't possibly come from ignorance alone. There is no greater predictor of how a judge will rule than the party of the president who appointed him/her. This is not really in dispute by anyone actually paying attention to the 9th circuit, federal appeals courts, or to SCOTUS, particuarly in the past 30 years or so.

Roberts is simply grandstanding and it's rightfully out of character for a position that is purported to be decidedly apolitical. Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/us/judges-rulings-follow-partisan-lines.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3212541/