The next Supreme Court term is set to begin tomorrow, but a recent survey suggests that fewer Americans are excited about the prospect and they are concerned about the direction the court is taking. Along with virtually every other branch of the government at every level, along with our federal law enforcement agencies, the Supreme Court has now registered a drop in public confidence and approval that The Hill is describing as a “historic low.” According to Gallup, fewer than half of all Americans still have at least “a fair amount” of trust in the court. The analysts reporting on this news are looking to blame the shift almost entirely on the court’s decision to return abortion laws to the prerogative of the states, but as we’ll discuss below, there are other culprits at play here.
One hundred days after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion, public approval of the court has dropped to historic lows as it prepares to open its new term on Monday.
According to a Gallup poll released on Thursday, just 47 percent of Americans said they have at least a “fair amount” of trust in the judicial branch, representing a 20-percentage-point drop from two years ago, including 7 points since last year.
A record number of people now view the court as too conservative. The drop in trust is driven largely by a sharp decline among Democrats, the poll found. Only 25 percent of Democrats, down from 50 percent a year ago, have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the court.
This is the second survey in a row where this trend has shown up. Last month, a Marquette University Law School poll found even worse results for the court. Only 40 percent of respondents in that poll said they “approved” of the job being done by the court.
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The greatest drop in approval of SCOTUS was seen among Democrats and liberals, of course. And we shouldn’t pretend that the court’s recent decision on abortion laws isn’t driving at least some of these numbers. One survey after another has shown that significant majorities in America favor abortion being legal in at least some circumstances, particularly in the first trimester or in cases involving rape, incest, or legitimate medical threats to the life of the mother. (Oh, I’m sorry. I meant to say “pregnancy-capable person in question.”) But at the same time, significant majorities oppose abortion on demand in the third trimester, so it’s complicated.
But the public’s attitude toward the court isn’t just springing up organically. It’s clearly being driven by the vast majority of our cable news outlets and larger, liberal newspapers. They have been demonizing the conservative justices on the Supreme Court for quite a while now and the volume of that demonization ramped up considerably after the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked.
Support for that interpretation of the story can be found in other questions Gallup posed. A record number of people said that the court has become “too conservative.” That’s an interesting stance for people to take, isn’t it? You never really seemed to hear them complaining about the court being “too liberal” back when justices appointed by Democrats held the majority.
The point here is that an opinion poll such as this was really never supposed to matter and it shouldn’t matter today. And yet, somehow it does and The Hill goes out of its way to play up how this might prove beneficial to Democrats in the midterms. But the Founders created the court to be above and outside of politics and the shifting whims of the public. Voters can hold the legislative and executive branches accountable during each election, but the Court changes members far, far more slowly and it’s virtually impossible to remove a justice from the court against their will. (Technically they can be impeached, but none have ever been removed in that fashion in the history of the country.)
The court is largely politicized and has been for some time, as I’ve argued here many times in the past. Far too often we are able to reliably predict how each of the justices will vote on hotly debated issues based on the political party of the president who nominated them. But there’s really no avoiding that, is there? And the current members of the court don’t really need to worry about Gallup’s results. They won’t be going anywhere in the foreseeable future barring something truly horrible and unanticipated. But if the press keeps feeding these fires, don’t be too shocked if you learn that someone else has shown up at one of the six conservative justices’ homes hoping to literally take a shot at them.
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