For Supreme Court's conservatives, it's all about the letter of the law

Conservatives are controlling most of the Supreme Court's closely divided cases so far this term by sticking to the words written by Congress.The justices have settled challenges involving the rights of workers, immigrants, prisoners and patent owners by painstakingly defining the meaning of "for," "shall," "any" and "other," along with "satisfy" and "salesman."

The result has been a series of 5-4 decisions written by Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito that rely on "textualism" — letting the statutes under review speak for themselves. It's what the late Justice Antonin Scalia preached, and what President Trump promised he would seek in choosing Gorsuch as Scalia's successor.

"Since the court lost the foremost textualist in its history, you’d just naturally expect that it would have become a little less textualist. And that just doesn’t seem true," says former U.S. solicitor general Paul Clement, who has argued more than 90 cases at the Supreme Court. 

“The terms of the debate have shifted,” Clement says. “You don’t want to walk into the court without a textualist argument.”