You're being misled about the Supreme Court | Opinion

A common critique of today’s Supreme Court is that its conservative majority is hostile to women, minorities and other groups – and that its rulings reflect that bias. A recent Washington Post article leans heavily on that narrative, arguing that the court has become the least friendly to civil rights in decades.

Each term brings decisions that complicate that narrative. But critics often focus on a handful of outcomes while ignoring the legal reasoning behind them.

That approach doesn’t just misread the court; it narrows the debate. Treating the conservative majority as a monolith pursuing a fixed policy agenda misses how its jurisprudence actually works – and helps explain why many on the left have struggled to mount a coherent response to originalism.

Misreading the Supreme Court's conservative majority

Originalism – the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its public meaning at the time it was adopted – now dominates the court’s conservative majority. All three justices appointed by President Donald Trump subscribe to some version of it.

As that philosophy has reshaped the court’s decisions, critics have searched for ways to explain the results. The Post analysis described this as “the first (court) since at least the '50s to reject claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities.”

That framing is loaded. It assumes that when the court rules against claims brought by certain groups, it is doing so because of who those groups are, rather than because of the legal questions at issue.

The court isn’t meant to decide policy directly; it decides questions of law, even when those rulings have clear policy consequences.

The Post article largely sidesteps the legal reasoning behind these decisions, focusing instead on outcomes. That approach flattens the court’s internal divisions. In the 2024-25 term, for example, Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with liberal Justices Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor more often than he did with fellow conservative Neil Gorsuch.

Treating the conservative justices as a monolith makes for a cleaner narrative. But it obscures how the court actually operates. And when the article turns to specific cases, it often leaves out key legal context.

Consider the article’s treatment of Chiles v. Salazar, which held that states cannot ban talk therapy aimed at changing someone’s gender identity. The piece presents it as part of a broader pattern but omits a key detail: The ruling was 8-1, with Kagan and Sotomayor in the majority.

That’s not what a simple ideological split looks like. It was a free speech case, and the logic cuts both ways: The same reasoning would also limit a state’s ability to ban “gender affirming” talk therapy.

The same problem shows up in the other cases The Post highlights, including those decided 6-3. The focus is on the outcome – a conservative majority ruling against a civil rights claim – rather than the legal question at issue.

Take United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for gender-transition care. The dispute wasn’t about the policy itself, but whether the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Because the law applies regardless of a patient’s sex, a majority of the court concluded that it did not.

In another case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, the court upheld a web designer’s right not to create a custom website for a same-sex wedding, again on free speech grounds.

Cases like this are often framed as straightforward civil rights disputes. But the legal questions are more complex, involving free speech, religious liberty and competing constitutional claims. Reducing them to the identity of the parties obscures the reasoning behind the rulings, and why those claims failed.

The Post’s analysis has another problem: sample size. It looks at just four years, the span of the current conservative majority, and compares that with prior periods of 15 years or more. A dataset of 50 cases is far more susceptible to swings than one drawn from decades of decisions.

The headline number also deserves scrutiny. From 2020 to 2024, the court ruled in favor of claims brought by women and minorities in 44% of those cases, a figure not far from an even split, and one that sits within a narrow range of variation.

Why outcome-driven critiques fall short

Reducing the court to a 6-3 conservative bloc misses how it operates. It treats the justices as predictable partisans, rather than jurists working through complex legal questions.

In reality, the court is made up of nine distinct voices, and its decisions often reflect shifting coalitions. Even in contentious cases, the justices frequently find common ground, a reminder that the law doesn’t map neatly onto political narratives.

If your preferred outcomes are losing in court, the answer isn’t to focus on the results alone. It’s to engage the legal arguments behind them and make better ones.

That’s where much of the current criticism of the court falls short. As originalism has gained influence, many of its critics have focused on outcomes rather than the reasoning driving them. And in doing so, they have struggled to mount a coherent response.

Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.