According to recent Gallup polls, less than half of Americans claimed they have “great lot” or “good amount” of faith in the judicial branch, which is presided over by the Supreme Court. The indicates how negatively the court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade this past summer has affected its standing with the public as a whole. That is the lowest that figure has been in the five decades that Gallup has been tracking the trend.
In Gallup’s study, only 47% of respondents said they had even a little faith in the federal judiciary, a startling 20-point decline over the previous two years and a 7-point decline from the previous year. The judicial branch’s tarnished reputation contrasts with trust levels exceeding two-thirds in most years, according to a Gallup trend that started in 1972, as noted by Gallup’s Jeffrey M. Jones.
And the judicial branch is severely falling behind its historical reputation in many ways than just trust. Only 4 out of 10 Americans stated they were satisfied with the Supreme Court’s performance, while 58% were not. That is on par with the lowest approval rating for the Supreme Court that Gallup has ever noted.
Simply put, public support for the court is at its lowest point in Gallup polling history.
The Roe judgement and the public’s perception of the court today are directly related. Half of Democrats said they trusted the court “greatly” or “fairly” last year, up from the other half. This percentage, which is currently at 25% in the most recent Gallup poll, represents a sharp reduction and the first time ever in Gallup polling history that less than half of Democrats have expressed a lack of confidence in the court.
Nearly half of independents (46%) said the Supreme Court is “too conservative,” while a majority of Republicans (58%) said the court’s ideology is “about right.” More than seven in ten Democrats (71%) said the Supreme Court is “too conservative,” while only 18% said its ideology is “about right” and 9% said it is “too liberal.”
John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, has long expressed concern and a desire to prevent the politicisation of the court. People tend to view everything in such terms when they live in a polarised political environment, Roberts remarked in 2019. The outcomes of our cases do not suggest different, and that is not how the court operates.
At least in the short term, it appears that Roberts’ ambitions of protecting the Supreme Court from political winds were dashed by the leak of a draught of the Roe judgement and the following opinion that abolished the constitutional right to an abortion. (Roberts referred to the Roe judgement draught leak as “simply horrible.”)
The conservative justice Samuel Alito, who authored the ruling that overturned Roe, responded to criticism of the court earlier this week. Everyone is free to disagree with our judgments and to critique our justifications as they see fit, Alito said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. But expressing or indicating that the court is evolving into an unreliable organisation or casting doubt on our integrity crosses a crucial threshold.
The court’s declining reputation coincides with a general fall in trust in almost all other American institutions. In a survey performed by Gallup over the summer, “substantial decreases” in trust were observed in 11 of the 16 major US institutions that were examined, and not a single institution had improved in trust over the previous year. Only 1 in 4 Americans said they had “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the Supreme Court in that survey, which was done before the Roe decision. This is a decline of 11 points from the previous year.
The court currently operates in this atmosphere of mistrust and unhappiness. At least for the time being, the dream of maintaining it independent of politics seems dead.
