The Supreme Court term that ended this week will be remembered for the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, but it will also go down as a year when a fractured conservative bloc resulted in a surprising number of liberal wins.
That doesn't mean the court has shifted left, as some have suggested. Instead, perhaps the biggest dynamic driving this term was overreaching by the court's most conservative justices.
Under the court's rules, the votes of four justices are needed to add a case to the docket, but a decision requires a majority of at least five.