Politics & Power Quote by Cass Sunstein

Sunstein is doing two things at once: deflating a panic and smuggling in a constitutional norm. The surface claim is empirical - Catholic identity, by itself, doesn’t predict judicial votes. But the real target is the lazy arithmetic of representation politics, where “nine Catholics” becomes shorthand for ideological capture. He’s warning against treating religion as a proxy for jurisprudence, a move that flatters cable-news caricatures while ignoring how judges actually reason: through interpretive method, institutional role, and elite legal culture as much as personal creed.

The “wide tent” phrasing matters. It borrows the language of party coalitions to reposition Catholicism as internally plural rather than monolithic - a strategic rebuttal to fears of a Vatican bloc on the bench. Subtext: if you want to critique a Court, criticize its legal philosophy (originalism vs. living constitutionalism, deference vs. skepticism), not the baptismal ledger. In a moment when courts are scrutinized for legitimacy, Sunstein is also protecting the Court’s standing by separating identity from outcomes.

Contextually, it lands amid recurring waves of anxiety about religious influence in U.S. law - abortion, contraception mandates, religious liberty claims - where Catholicism is often framed as uniquely determinative. Sunstein’s lawyerly realism cuts against that: Catholic judges can be textualists or pragmatists, libertarians or communitarians, deferential institutionalists or rights maximalists. The line is calming, but not naive; it implies a harder truth about modern power: elite institutions homogenize in ways that matter more than denominational labels.