Why so few "home run" Republican-appointed Justices?

And why so many Democrat-appointed ones?

My post last night, in which I said that Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees aren’t “home runs,” prompted my friend Jim Dueholm to ponder in the comment section why Democratic presidents are able consistently to appoint home runs while Republicans presidents often end up appointing “Texas League singles.”

In my view, at least two of Trump’s appointees — Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — are better than singles, but some past Republican appointees haven’t been a hit of any kind. So Jim’s query is a fair one.

Jim offers an answer. He writes:

Statutory and administrative law and Supreme Court decisions for the past 85 years have built a judicial playing field that makes it easy for Democratic justices to hit home runs. The existing law for them is a gopher ball. Existing law for Republican appointees is a wicked curve, and as lawyers, trained to play on the field as they find it,, they're likely to conclude a Texas league single is the best they can or should do.

I think there’s force to this explanation. However, it took a judicial revolution to carve out the law that makes it easy, in some instances, for liberal Democrat Justices to hit home runs. And when, even then, existing law stands in the way, the liberal Dems often cast that law aside.

Republicans have been far less inclined to do this. It took almost 50 years for them to overturn the egregiously erroneous law on abortion. They have countenanced blatant racial discrimination by colleges and universities for almost as long. Maybe they will finally balk this month. Maybe not.

Therefore, while, as I say, there’s merit to Jim’s explanation, it seems to me that additional explaining is required.

A common (and easy) explanation is that Republican appointees, if not already part of the Washington establishment, are sucked into it by the desire to read favorable things about themselves in the mainstream media (and, in some accounts, the desire to be invited to the right cocktail parties).

I can’t say that this theory hasn’t applied to a Justice or two, but I don’t put a great deal of stock in it, as a general matter.

My theory, which I offer as a supplement to Jim’s, is that Democrat appointees typically hit liberal home runs because they are part of a single-minded, disciplined, result-oriented movement. Republican appointees typically fail to hit them because conservatives are part of an intellectually diverse and less single-minded movement.

There are, of course, divisions among left-liberals. But left-liberals are good at putting them aside when the chips are down. That’s why they fell so uniformly in line when it came time to nominate Joe Biden. Left-liberals didn’t fail to notice Biden’s shortcomings, but they overlooked them in the name of winning an election.

I don’t doubt that Democrat-appointed Supreme Court Justices are well aware of the shortcomings of some of the rulings in which they join. But they overlook these weaknesses in the name of reaching the liberal result.

I don’t deny that Republican-appointed Justices behave similarly at times. But they are less inclined to, and more likely to adhere to the particular brand of jurisprudence they espouse, than their Democrat counterparts.

Take Justice Gorsuch. He’s committed to his own brand textualism. If applying it leads him to a result liberals favor and conservatives reject, he’s liable to embrace that result. This, in fact, is what he did when he found that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination against gays, lesbians, and transgendered individuals.

Or take the Chief Justice and Justice Kavanaugh. When they were coming up through the ranks, judicial activism was a conservative bugaboo. So, while charges of activism won’t always stand in the way of them joining conservative colleagues in changing a certain body of law, it will stand in the way sometimes. (In the Chief Justice’s case, concern about the Court’s image may reinforce this tendency.)

I detect no such scruples among Democrat-appointed Justices. They are activist when it suits their purposes and ready to decry activism when activism doesn’t. Nor am I aware of any Democrat appointee who, even occasionally, applies an idiosyncratic method of analysis to reach a result that displeases left-liberals.

That’s just not how they roll. Hence, the home runs.