Both elected officials on the left and most of the MSM are really upset about the Supreme Court these days, and they have been ever since all of Donald Trump’s nominees were seated. We’ve been hearing calls to pack the court, while others have suggested impeaching some of the more conservative-leaning justices. We saw some of that anger on display this week on Meet the Press when Chuck Todd offered his keen insights into why the court is so “broken” today. Check out this short video clip from the show.

Todd cites some recent polling showing low levels of public confidence in the Supreme Court. (Spoiler alert, Chuck. Confidence in the entire government is plummeting for good reason, along with federal law enforcement and the intelligence community.) He describes the court as being “more powerful than ever” while also being “more broken” than ever. Their robes are now actually red and blue rather than black.

Todd places the blame on the Senate for failing to approve judicial nominees by a wide margin as they did back in “the old days.” To his credit, he spreads the blame around to both parties for wanting activist judges rather than “umpires.” But he displays particular disdain for the Heritage Foundation, which he claims now completely controls the SCOTUS nomination process for GOP presidents. (That’s arguably true in practice, but the President can still nominate whoever he or she likes.) But if you’re willing to look at the actual data, you’ll see that the liberal justices vote in unison far more often than the conservatives. (The linked study comes to us from 2019.)

There were 67 decisions after argument in the term that ended in June. In those cases, the four justices appointed by Democratic presidents voted the same way 51 times, while the five Republican appointees held tight 37 times. And of the 20 cases where the court split 5-4, only seven had the “expected” ideological divide of conservatives over liberals. By the end of the term, each conservative justice had joined the liberals as the deciding vote at least once.

That dynamic isn’t something that sprang up in the Trump era or with the court’s newest personnel. In the 2014-15 term, with Kennedy at the height of his “swing vote” power —the last full term before Justice Antonin Scalia’s death and resulting year-long vacancy — the four liberals stuck together in 55 of 66 cases, while the four conservatives (not counting Kennedy) voted as a unit in 39.

But as Chuck Todd himself admits, this isn’t a new phenomenon that arrived with Donald Trump. Presidents from both parties have been nominating justices that hew further to the left and right for quite a while. And prior to Trump, liberal justices nominated by Democrats held a majority. There were plenty of close, “party-line” rulings from the Supreme Court back then and I don’t recall hearing anyone complaining about the court being “broken.” That’s because the rulings were mostly going their way.

Even back in the “old days,” the nomination and confirmation processes may have played out a bit differently, but they also produced unexpected results and seeming contradictions. Think back to 1973 and the original ruling in Roe v Wade. While several justices expressed reservations about the case, they still decided that there was some sort of constitutional right to abortion by a 7-2 margin. That must have been the work of a pack of nasty liberals, right?

Hardly. The original Roe vote was supported by a very mixed bag on the bench. Among the seven who voted for Roe, they really wouldn’t fit the “mold” you would expect today. Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote the majority opinion and he was appointed by Nixon. (That was just poor vetting because Blackmun went on to be considered one of the most liberal justices in the history of the court.) Chief Justice Warren Burger and Lewis F. Powell were also Nixon appointees. Potter Stewart was appointed by Eisenhower, as was William J. Brennan Jr. Of the seven voting for abortion rights, only two were nominated by a Democrat. William O. Douglas and Thurgood Marshall were both nominated by FDR.

Of the two justices voting against the decision, it was an even split. Byron White was nominated by JFK and William Rehnquist was nominated by Nixon. So in the end, the original Roe ruling was passed mostly by GOP-nominated justices. I just wanted to offer a bit of historical perspective to show that things are not always as they seem and most certainly as they are portrayed in the liberal media.