Big Business enjoys another good year at the Supreme Court

A year ago tomorrow, the Constitution Accountability Center published an analysis that proved to be quite memorable.

That’s a pretty impressive streak.. When we think about institutions and interest groups that tend to do well at the high court, plenty of entities may come to mind, but as regular readers may recall, it’s Big Business and Corporate America that have consistently found a friendly ear among the majority of the sitting justices.

 

And though I haven’t yet seen an analysis of the Chamber of Commerce’s success rate at the Supreme Court in 2015, it seems unlikely to drag down its overall average in the Roberts era.

 

For example, though this angle probably didn’t generate as much attention as it should have, Corporate America desperately wanted the Obama administration to win its big fight over the Affordable Care Act. Republicans may like to pretend “Obamacare” is strangling the private sector, but private-sector leaders know better — the ACA is as good for business as it is for working families — and urged the court to side with the White House. It did.

 

Corporate America generally wanted the justices to endorse marriage equality, too. That also worked out well.

 

A variety of business interests pleaded with the court to block the EPA’s regulations on toxic pollutants, and as we saw this morning, the justices agreed this morning to do exactly that.

 

This isn’t to say business interests batted 1.000. If it were up to the private sector, the Fair Housing Act case, for example, would have gone the other way.

 

But at first blush, the broader pattern seems pretty stable. When it comes to the Roberts court, if you’re guessing which side is going to win a big case, you’ll win most of the time if you bet on the side of business interests.