My MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin summarized matters nicely in a single sentence: “As if there isn’t enough going on with Election Day just weeks away, the Supreme Court is starting a new term.”
But as the high court and its dominant conservative majority get back to work and consider a lengthy list of important cases, the justices aren’t exactly winning any popularity contests. The Hill reported last week:
Public trust in the Supreme Court is at a record low, with more than half of Americans disapproving of the nation’s highest court since its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, a new survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania showed. The survey, conducted from July 12 to August 12, found that 56 percent of Americans disapprove somewhat of the court, saying they either trust it “a little” or “not at all.”
The same national research found, “Asked how much, if at all, do you trust the court to act in the best interest of people like you, 1 in 3 people (34%) in August say ‘not at all’” up from 30% in May. In a 2005 APPC survey, only 7% did ‘not at all’ trust the court, which shows a stunning increase in distrust over the past two decades.” (Click the link for additional information on the survey’s methodology and margins of error.)
It’s tempting to assume that the justices won’t care since they’re not in elected positions, but as regular readers know, it was a few years ago when Justice Amy Coney Barrett made a public appearance in which the conservative jurist declared, “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”
Last year, Justice Brett Kavanaugh made similar comments, insisting that the Supreme Court is “an institution of law not of politics, not of partisanship.” The conservative added that he believes that the current lineup of justices has succeeded in “deciding cases based on law and not based on partisan affiliation and partisanship.”
Apparently, those declarations aren’t persuading much of the American mainstream, as the data from the Annenberg Public Policy Center helps show.
Before anyone says, “Sure, but this is just one poll,” let’s not forget just how common results like these have been over the last couple of years. It was just last month, for example, when the Pew Research Center found favorable views of the high court mired in record lows.
Two months earlier, The Associated Press reported on the results of its new national poll, which found that a clear majority of Americans believe the current justices are “more likely to be guided by their own ideology rather than serving as neutral arbiters of government authority.”
A Quinnipiac University poll released last summer also found that 70% of Americans think that Supreme Court justices are too influenced by politics. Around the same time, an NBC News poll found the high court’s standing at the lowest point “since NBC News began measuring public sentiment about the court” more than 30 years ago.








