Poll: Oh Man, People Really, Really Hate the Supreme Court These Days
The justices’ official position is that the Supreme Court is not a partisan institution. They are also basically the only people in the country who believe it anymore.
Earlier this summer, Gallup pollsters called a random sample of 1,002 adults to ask a question that, if the results are any indication, occasionally elicited contemptuous, expletive-laden answers: Do you approve of the way the U.S. Supreme Court is doing its job these days?
For an institution whose members purport to prize their nonpartisan, independent bona fides, the past four years have already been pretty rough: Since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation yielded the current six-justice Republican supermajority in late 2020, the Court’s approval rating has never been higher than 44 percent. But this latest poll is a new nadir for the institution’s popularity: Overall, just 39 percent of respondents now give their seal of approval to the justices. The 64-point gap between Republican and Democratic respondents is a record high, edging the 61-point gap from right after the justices overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Among Democrats, the Court’s 11 percent approval rating is the lowest ever recorded, and is roughly on par with the Rotten Tomatoes score for Freddy Got Fingered. Meanwhile, the 75 percent approval rating among Republicans is the highest since January 2001, shortly after the five conservative justices decided to hand the presidency to George W. Bush.
Incredible though it may seem in the midst of a near-unbroken streak of cases holding that the Constitution protects Donald Trump’s fundamental right to do whatever the fuck he wants, the results are a near-inversion of the partisan gap from 10 years ago, when 76 percent of Democrats and 18 percent of Republicans approved of the Court’s performance. The June 2015 opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Court recognized a right to same-sex marriage that the Republican justices are still bitching about to this day, probably had something to do with that result.
As regular readers of this website are aware, the justices—Republicans and Democrats alike—love nothing more than insisting that they are not politicians, and that the Court is not a political body, and that the aforementioned near-unbroken streak of cases holding that the Constitution protects Donald Trump’s fundamental right to do whatever the fuck he wants is a weird statistical anomaly, maybe, but nothing for anyone to be concerned about. It is thus heartening to see that once again, the normal people whose lives are governed by the justices’ decisions are uninterested in entertaining this embarrassing fairytale anymore.
Just as a matter of math, it will be a challenge for the Court to poll significantly worse among Democrats in the future. But I am confident that if the justices maintain their current pace of doing shadow-docket reactionary politics, they will push themselves into Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever territory soon enough.
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I doubt any of the SCOTUS justices even believe anymore that their SCOTUS is not a partisan institution. Some may say that to try to salvage the court's supposed "legitimacy," but they can't believe it. If they do believe it, they are too credulous to even be on the Court.