2026-06-19T08:00:25.508Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/19/politics/analysis-supreme-court-missing-center
50多年来，桑德拉·戴·奥康纳和安东尼·肯尼迪等保守派中间派大法官一直是美国最高法院的定盘星。
如今的最高法院已不再具备务实的中间立场，这导致了具有里程碑意义的判决被推翻，大法官之间的紧张关系也愈演愈烈。
中期选举 primaries 期间近期作出的选举权判决，彰显了中间派缺席如何重塑美国法律。
本文AI生成摘要经CNN编辑审核。
半个多世纪以来，一系列保守派中间派大法官一直主导着最高法院6月最受关注的期末判决，其中就包括桑德拉·戴·奥康纳和安东尼·肯尼迪这类务实的大法官。
奥康纳曾是州参议员，拥有敏锐的政治直觉，她还通过倡导大法官们在口头辩论后共进午餐、安排桥牌聚会，偶尔组织与外国法官会面等方式，打造了一种“社交粘合剂”。她坚信，即便大法官们在法律问题上存在分歧，也应维系彼此的团结。
如今的大法官团队在多个层面出现分裂，最核心的分歧在于他们不可调和的观点。最高法院以6比3的比例沿意识形态路线分裂，即便在保守派的6名大法官内部，他们在推翻先例、重审过往案件的激进程度上也存在分歧。
当前最高法院的一个显著特征，就是缺乏务实的中间派。这种后果已经酝酿多年，但在近期的判决以及大法官们的协作方式中已愈发明显。
今年春季作出的路易斯安那州和阿拉巴马州选举权案件判决，使得纠正选区重划中蓄意的种族歧视变得几乎不可能，这充分展现了这场正在发生的历史性变革。
这些判决不仅推翻了法律先例。恰逢美国当前的中期选举周期，它们以一种总体上有利于共和党的方式，扰乱了全国范围内的选举实践。
这一系列判决与推翻《罗伊诉韦德案》、终结高等教育中的平权法案等事件一道，反映出一种与肯尼迪、奥康纳以及此前的刘易斯·鲍威尔大法官所持的务实考量截然相反的思维模式。这三位大法官均由共和党总统任命。
1992年，奥康纳和肯尼迪投票支持保留1973年《罗伊诉韦德案》确立的堕胎权，他们表示，不能忽视推翻该判决对“那些早已围绕这一案件规划自身思想与生活的人们”所造成的代价。
他们从更广泛的社会层面阐释了最高法院的困境：“我们中的一些人个人认为堕胎有悖于我们最基本的道德准则，但这不能左右我们的判决。我们的职责是界定所有人的自由，而非强制推行我们自身的道德准则。”
十年前，当鲍威尔投下关键的第五票，确保无证移民子女享有公立教育权时，他写道：“几乎没有任何合理理由可以证明，在我国境内制造一个不识字的弱势群体是符合任何人利益的。”
与现任约翰·罗伯茨首席大法官领导下的多数派不同，鲍威尔、奥康纳和肯尼迪从未打算彻底重塑国家的法律体系。
“肯尼迪大法官和奥康纳大法官都在意整个国家对最高法院的看法，”密歇根大学法学教授莉亚·利特曼说道，她曾是肯尼迪的书记员。“他们为最高法院提供了中间立场，因为他们关注国家的中间、主流观点，不希望最高法院偏离这些观点太远。这完全合理——一个由未经选举产生的最高层级法院，去迎合国内越来越小众的群体，是行不通的。”
建设性中间派的消失，很可能是导致当前书面意见中出现尖锐对立，以及大法官们在解决案件时明显遇到困难的原因之一。距离当前的2025-26庭审季结束还有约10天，大法官们还有17起案件待审，其中几起涉及唐纳德·特朗普总统权力的边界问题。
这些争议涉及特朗普试图限制出生公民权，公然违反第14修正案中“凡在美国出生或归化美国的人，均为美国公民”的保障条款，以及特朗普试图解雇独立机构负责人， Specifically 联邦贸易委员会和美联储主席。罗伯茨在过往案件中曾试图扩大总统对联邦贸易委员会等行政机构的权力，这使其与特朗普立场一致。
“我曾认为罗伯茨具备体制内的务实精神，”乔治敦大学法学教授布拉德·斯奈德说道，“但我当时多少是戴着有色眼镜看问题。”
斯奈德指出，今年4月作出的大幅限制选举权的路易斯安那州判决，以及2024年那份给予特朗普在竞选连任期间重大起诉豁免权的判决，当时他仍面临2020年选举颠覆相关的指控。
这两起判决都强化了公众的认知，正如斯奈德所说，大法官们是“身着法袍的政客”——而这正是罗伯茨一直努力驳斥的观点。
作为特朗普第一任期任命的第三位大法官，艾米·科尼·巴雷特大法官是改造最高法院的催化剂，她于2020年10月接替已故的自由派大法官露丝·巴德·金斯伯格。这意味着最高法院在现代历史上首次出现了由6名保守派大法官组成的绝对多数派。
其后果不仅仅是保守派席位从5席增至6席的一票之差。对于形成多数判决所需的关键一票而言，这额外的一票助长了保守派的气焰，正如后续相继推翻里程碑式判决的行动所证明的那样：2022年推翻堕胎权相关判例、2023年终结大学平权法案，以及今年的选区重划改革判决。
在此期间，大法官们以熟悉的6比3分歧，在2024年强化了总统豁免权，2025年宣布联邦法官无权发布普遍禁令以阻止总统的政策。
同样重要的是：即便要受理一起案件，也需要4票赞成（而非作出判决所需的5票），因此，由民主党总统任命的3名自由派大法官，如今至少需要获得一名共和党任命的保守派大法官的支持，才能启动上诉听证程序。
2020年之前的数十年间，以5比4划分保守派与自由派的最高法院判决更为灵活。诚然，奥康纳（1981年至2006年任职）和肯尼迪（1988年至2018年任职）属于保守派。他们在2000年的《布什诉戈尔案》中与右翼同僚站在一起，在佛罗里达州选票计票存在争议的情况下，将白宫宝座交给了得克萨斯州共和党州长乔治·W·布什，而非民主党副总统阿尔·戈尔。另外，肯尼迪在2010年撰写的《联合公民诉联邦选举委员会》判决意见书，为选举活动引入更多企业资金铺平了道路，当时他坚定地站在保守派阵营。
但奥康纳和肯尼迪也曾投票支持保留延续数十年的堕胎权，并经常寻求中间立场，例如在政教分离的相关测试案件中。
肯尼迪还撰写了在全国范围内合法化同性婚姻的判决意见书，并保留了联邦法官可以制止极端党派操纵选区划分的可能性。2019年，即他卸任大法官一职的次年，最高法院以5比4的投票结果裁定，联邦法官无权裁决政客在绘制选区界线时是否过度偏袒本党。
卡瓦诺和巴雷特改造最高法院
将美国最高法院带至当前局面的变革始于2018年，时任大法官布雷特·卡瓦诺——另一位肯尼迪前书记员——接替肯尼迪，以及2020年巴雷特的任命。由于最高法院长期以来一直存在务实的中间派，最高法院学者在最初几年一直在观察，他们两人或其他大法官是否填补了这一空缺。
“我们当中有人认为巴雷特可能会扮演这一角色，”哈佛大学法学教授理查德·拉扎勒斯说道。“她在一定程度上做到了，但她并不像鲍威尔、奥康纳或肯尼迪多年来那样具有 pivotal 作用。”
与罗伯茨一样，巴雷特偶尔也会在特定案件中与自由派站在一起。但她的动机源于其文本主义方法论和对窄幅判决的追求，而非至少可追溯至鲍威尔（1972年至1987年任职）时期的务实精神。
近几个月来，巴雷特在宣传自己的新书时，解释了她的法律方法以及“我角色的局限性”。在法学院校园和其他公开场合，她将自己聚焦于法律精确文本的做法，与“以务实为指引”或“仅依靠自身的正义感来裁决案件”进行了对比。
她并未加入特朗普诉美国案中最激进的多数派意见。在2024年的另一起案件中，她也持不同意见，反对多数派认为政府检察官超出了阻挠法规的界限的观点，当时检察官正在起诉参与2021年1月6日国会山袭击事件的人员。
尽管如此，巴雷特还是完全支持多数派在《多布斯诉杰克逊妇女健康组织案》中推翻延续半个世纪的堕胎权判例。作为投票限制生殖权利的第六名保守派大法官，罗伯茨与推翻《罗伊诉韦德案》的多数派保持了距离。罗伯茨希望限制《罗伊案》的适用范围，但仍保留对女性终止妊娠权利的部分保护。
极右翼阵营中最坚定的成员是克拉伦斯·托马斯、塞缪尔·阿利托和尼尔·戈萨奇大法官。自1991年任职以来，托马斯在今年4月的一次演讲中谴责那些“将自己重塑为体制主义者、务实派或深思熟虑的温和派，以此为自己的失败辩解，无论是对自己、对良知还是对国家”的人。
坚定站在左翼阵营的是索尼娅·索托马约尔、埃琳娜·卡根和凯坦吉·布朗·杰克逊大法官。
当前左右两派阵营之间的紧张关系一直在升级。今年5月，在保守派多数派投票加速发布与其路易斯安那州选举权判决相关的命令后，持不同意见的杰克逊大法官表示，多数派试图影响该州的选举。阿利托在托马斯和戈萨奇的支持下，称杰克逊的意见书“毫无根据且极具侮辱性”。
芝加哥大学法学教授阿齐兹·胡克将当前的紧张局势追溯至2022年提前泄露的推翻《罗伊诉韦德案》的多布斯案判决意见书。“自多布斯案判决意见书泄露以来，我认为我们已经看到公开证据表明，大法官之间的摩擦已经达到了远超正常情况的不信任程度。”
泄露事件发生后不久，托马斯缅怀了他与前首席大法官威廉·伦奎斯特和奥康纳共事时的 collegiality，奥康纳曾劝说所有大法官一起共进午餐，并以活跃餐桌上的谈话氛围而闻名。
https://www.cnn.com/
克拉伦斯·托马斯大法官在《罗伊诉韦德案》草案泄露后发声
1:07 • 来源：CNN
在伦奎斯特2005年去世、奥康纳2006年退休之前的那段时期，托马斯回忆说，大法官们“彼此之间确实相互信任”。
“我们或许是一个功能失调的家庭，但我们仍是一个大家庭……你们一起欢笑，每天一起共进午餐。”
如今，最高法院仍会在每日口头辩论后举行私人午餐会。只是如今，缺席午餐会变得更加容易了。
Analysis: What the missing center has meant for the Supreme Court
2026-06-19T08:00:25.508Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/19/politics/analysis-supreme-court-missing-center
For over 50 years, conservative centrists like Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy anchored the Supreme Court.
Today’s court lacks a pragmatic middle, leading to landmark reversals and heightened tensions among justices.
Recent voting rights rulings during midterm primaries demonstrate how the absence of a center reshapes American law.
AI-generated summary was reviewed by a CNN editor.
For more than a half century, the Supreme Court was anchored by a series of conservative centrists who controlled the most anticipated end-of-term rulings in June, pragmatic justices like Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy.
O’Connor, a former state senator with keen political instincts, also created a social glue by encouraging lunch together after oral arguments, arranging bridge parties and occasionally organizing trips to meet with foreign judges. She believed in keeping the justices together even when they feuded on the law.
Today’s justices are ruptured in multiple ways, most importantly in their intractable views. They are split 6-3 along ideological lines, and even within the six-justice conservative bloc, the justices divide over how far to upset precedent and roll back past cases.
A particularly defining characteristic of today’s bench is the absence of a pragmatic middle. The consequences have been building for years, but they have crystallized both in recent decisions and the way the justices are working together.
The Louisiana and Alabama voting-rights cases this spring that make it nearly impossible to remedy intentional race discrimination in redistricting demonstrate the historic change underway.
Those rulings did more than topple legal precedents. Coming in the middle of the country’s current midterm primaries-cycle, they have disrupted electoral practices across the country in a way that mostly benefits Republicans.
They fit a pattern that, along with reversal of Roe v. Wade and the end of racial affirmative action in higher education, reflects a mindset the opposite of the pragmatic considerations Kennedy, O’Connor, and before them, Justice Lewis Powell, held. All three were appointed by Republican presidents.
When O’Connor and Kennedy voted in 1992 to preserve the 1973 right to abortion in Roe, they said they could not dismiss the cost of reversal to “ people who have ordered their thinking and living around that case.”
They cast the court’s dilemma in broader societal terms: “Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”
A decade earlier, when Powell cast the key fifth vote to ensure a right to public education for children of undocumented immigrants, he wrote, “It hardly can be argued rationally that anyone benefits from the creation within our borders of a subclass of illiterate persons.”
Unlike today’s majority under Chief Justice John Roberts, neither Powell, nor O’Connor and Kennedy, set out to wholly remake the country’s laws.
“Both Justices Kennedy and O’Connor cared about what the country as a whole thought about the court,” said University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman, a former Kennedy clerk. “They provided a middle to the court because they cared about the middle, median views in the country and didn’t want the Supreme Court to stray too far from that. And rightfully so – it doesn’t work to have an apex, unelected court that’s catering to a smaller and smaller minority section of the country.”
The disappearance of a constructive center likely contributes to the current testiness in written opinions and apparent difficulties in resolving cases. With about 10 days to go in the current 2025-26 session, the justices have 17 cases left, several concerning the boundaries of President Donald Trump’s power.
The disputes involve Trump’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship, defying the 14th Amendment guarantee that anyone born on US soil is automatically a US citizen, and Trump’s effort to fire the heads of independent agencies, specifically at the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Roberts has in past cases sought to expand presidential power over executive agencies such as the FTC, putting him in sync with Trump.
“I thought there was an institutional pragmatism to Roberts,” said Georgetown University law professor Brad Snyder, “but I kind of had on rose-colored glasses.”
Snyder pointed to the Louisiana decision in April that dramatically curtailed voting rights and the 2024 opinion that gave Trump significant immunity from prosecution as he was running for reelection and still faced charges of election subversion from 2020.
Both decisions reinforced the public perception that the justices are, as Snyder put it, “politicians in robes, an idea that Roberts has otherwise worked hard to dispel.”
As the third appointee of Trump’s first term, Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the catalyst for the transformed court, having succeeded the late liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg in October 2020. That meant, for the first time in modern history, the court had a six-justice conservative supermajority.
The consequence was not merely a one-vote difference, between five and six, on the right. The spare vote for what’s needed to produce a majority emboldened conservatives, as seen in the successive reversals of milestone rulings on abortion rights, in 2022; college affirmative action, in 2023; and the redistricting overhaul this year.
In between, by the familiar 6-3 split, the justices in 2024 enhanced presidential immunity and in 2025 declared that federal judges lack authority to issue universal injunctions to block presidential policies.
Equally important: Because it takes four votes even to grant a case (as opposed to five to decide it), the three Democratic-appointed liberals now need at least one of the Republican-appointed conservatives to join them to even grant a hearing for an appeal.
The 5-4, conservative-liberal split that defined the court in the decades before 2020 was more fluid. To be sure, O’Connor (who served from 1981-2006) and Kennedy (1988-2018) were conservatives. They joined their right-wing colleagues in the 2000 case of Bush v. Gore, giving Texas Republican Governor George W. Bush the White House over Democratic Vice President Al Gore in the middle of a disputed Florida vote count. Separately, Kennedy was solidly with the conservatives as he wrote the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision of 2010 that led to more corporate money in election campaigns.
But O’Connor and Kennedy also voted to retain decades-old reproductive rights and regularly sought a middle ground, for example, in tests of the separation of church and state.
Kennedy also wrote the decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide and kept open the possibility that federal judges could block extreme partisan gerrymanders. In 2019, the year after he left the bench, the court ruled 5-4 that federal judges lack the authority to decide if politicians went too far in drawing district lines to protect partisans.
Kavanaugh and Barrett transform the court
The changes that brought the country to this moment began in 2018, when Justice Brett Kavanaugh – another former Kennedy clerk – succeeded Kennedy, and, in 2020, the appointment of Barrett. Because of the long history of a pragmatic center, Supreme Court scholars watched in the early years to see if either of them or another justice filled the void.
“There were those of us who thought Barrett might play that role,” said Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus. “To a small degree she has, but she is not pivotal the way Powell, O’Connor or Kennedy were through the years.”
Barrett, like Roberts, has occasionally sided with the left in select cases. But her motivation is rooted in her textualist methodology and desire for narrow results, rather than the pragmatism that dates back at least to Powell (who served from 1972-1987).
As she has been promoting her book in recent months, Barrett has explained her legal approach and the “limits of my role.” On law school campuses and at other public appearances, she has contrasted her focus on the precise text of a law to “having pragmatism be your guide” or using “just your sense of justice in resolving cases.”
She did not join the majority in the most aggressive part of the Trump v. US decision. She also dissented, in a separate 2024 case, from the majority view that government prosecutors exceeded the bounds of an obstruction statute as they charged people involved in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Still, Barrett was fully with the majority to reverse a half century of abortion rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center Organization. Roberts, who was a sixth vote to limit reproductive rights, separated himself from the majority that toppled Roe v. Wade. Roberts wanted to restrict Roe but retain some protection for a woman’s right to end a pregnancy.
The most consistent members of the far right are Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. Thomas, who has served since 1991, decried in an April speech people who “recast themselves as institutionalists, pragmatists, or thoughtful moderates, all as a way of justifying their failures to themselves, their consciences, and their country.”
Solidly on the left wing are Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Tensions between the current right and left blocs have been boiling. In May, after the conservative majority voted to speed up the release of an order tied to their Louisiana voting-rights decision, dissenting Justice Jackson said the majority was trying to influence elections in the state. Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, called Jackson’s opinion “baseless and insulting.”
University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq traces the current tensions to the 2022 early leak of the Dobbs opinion reversing Roe v. Wade. “Ever since the leak of the Dobbs opinion, I think we’ve seen public evidence of frictions amounting to more distrust than is normally the case among the justices.”
Shortly after the leak, Thomas lamented an absence of the collegiality he experienced with former Chief Justice William Rehnquist and O’Connor, who cajoled all the justices into eating lunch together and had a reputation for keeping the conversation around the table going.
https://www.cnn.com/
Justice Clarence Thomas speaks out after Roe v. Wade draft leak
1:07 • Source: CNN
In the era leading up to Rehnquist’s 2005 death and O’Connor’s 2006 retirement, Thomas recalled the justices “actually trusted” each other.
“We might have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family. … You laughed together. You went to lunch together every day.”
The court still holds a private lunch after the daily oral arguments. It’s just that it’s easier to skip these days.
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