Was It Really A Good Year for Liberals?

An article by David Cole in today's on-line version of "The Nation" magazine, specifically about the Supreme Court ruling on ACA, makes an interesting point about this years session of the Supremes. 

A Good Year for Liberals Before a Conservative Court

Indeed, it is worth noting, as the term draws to a close, that this conservative Court issued a surprising number of liberal decisions this term. It struck down mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles; invalidated a penalty imposed on broadcasters for “indecent” speech; struck down a law making it a crime to lie about one’s wartime honors; extended the right to “effective assistance of counsel” to plea bargaining; invalidated most of Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB 1070; ruled that installing a GPS to monitor an automobile’s public movements requires a warrant; retroactively applied a liberalized crack cocaine sentencing regime to persons who had committed their crimes before the reforms were introduced; and held that the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial right requires the state to prove facts that increase a criminal fine to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. All in all, not a bad year for liberals before a conservative Supreme Court. But stay tuned, because next year it is likely to take up affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act and gay marriage.

Cole makes an interesting point, but instead of celebrating all I can think about is how fragile many of these rulings were.  I don't recall the details for all of them, but many I know were 5-4 decisions.  Those could all be undone if the next president gets to replace a Ginsburg or Breyer with another Scalia, Thomas or Alito.

The early analysis of today's healthcare decision that I've read agrees with some of the opinions I read shortly after the case was argued, at the time most people were focusing pessimistically on the antagonistic questioning by the court's conservatives.  What I read then agrees with the analysis I'm reading now (hell, it could all be written by the same people, for all I know), namely that Roberts is smart enough to be concerned with the image of the court as an institution and is worried about the degree in which Americans already consider it politicized.

Most analyses I've read of the Roberts court before today suggest it is more aggressively driven by an activist conservative agenda than any court in history, and I would partially balance all of the "liberal" decisions cited by David Cole with the fact that the court had the opportunity to hear a case from Montana that would have allowed a reassessment of their Citizens United decision, but they opted not to do so. (Although it is worth noting that most of the stories we've been reading about the super PACS and the huge individual contributions to them would exist even without the Citizens United decision....sad to say.)