The public is catching on

Becoming the Republican Party’s Politburo –with John Roberts’s enthusiastic leadership — continues to damage the public perception of the Supreme Court:

Driven by political partisanship, public trust in the U.S. Supreme Court has continued a downward slide since the court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning the Roe v. Wade ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion, according to a new survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania.

More than half of Americans (56%) now disapprove of the Supreme Court, saying they trust it either “a little” or “not at all” to act in the best interest of “people like you,” according to the nationally representative panel survey conducted in July and August 2024.

Support for the court stands at 44%, with 8% expressing “a great deal” of trust, 11% “a lot” of trust, and 25% “a moderate amount” of trust in the court to act in the best interest of people like you. It is the lowest overall level of trust since APPC began surveying the American public on this issue in 2005, when 75% of the public trusted the court.

Why won’t the public understand that John Roberts is just a humble umpire calling balls and strikes, and how is it his fault if Donald Trump has never thrown a ball?

I will return to this later, but this helps to explain why the Court’s courtesans are coming out with desperate new whines on behalf of the proposition that the Court is owed a fixed and high level of normative legitimacy irrespective of its conduct. That’s not how things work, or how they should work.