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Big Business enjoys another good year at the Supreme 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.
Supreme Court Justices
U.S. Supreme Court members (first row L-R) Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, (back row L-R) Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice Samuel Alito and Associate Justice Elena Kagan pose for a portrait at the Supreme Court building October 8, 2010 in Washington, DC.
By Steve Benen
A year ago tomorrow, the Constitution Accountability Center published an analysis that proved to be quite memorable.

The Roberts Court's decision on June 26 in NLRB v. Noel Canning capped off yet another winning Supreme Court Term for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, giving the Chamber an 11-5 record for the current Term (69%), a 32-8 record over the last three Terms (80%), and a 70% success rate overall since both John Roberts and Samuel Alito joined the Court.

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.