3 charts that explain the politicized Supreme Court

it's just another partisan institution these days.

The Supreme Court’s recent spate of decisions — on affirmative action and student loans among other things — have, again, turned the nation’s highest court into a political football.

Liberals are calling for the Court to be fundamentally reformed — adding term limits for the justices or growing the number of people serving on the bench to as many as 14.

“The courts, if they were to proceed without any check on their power, without any balance on their power, then we will start to see an undemocratic and, frankly, dangerous authoritarian expansion of power in the Supreme Court,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said on CNN over the weekend.

The truth is — for all the attention around the Court these past few days — that it had already become, in the eyes of the public, a partisan entity that has been fading in terms of trust and confidence in recent years.

Polling reflects the changing face of SCOTUS.

Here’s a look at Gallup’s data set on confidence in the Court — released June 23, 2022.

That 25% who express either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the Court is the lowest in the history of Gallup polling — 5 points lower than the previous nadir measured in 2014.¹

The lack of confidence in the Court is twinned with a belief that the Supremes aren’t doing their job well or right.

Here’s more Gallup data — from September 2022 — that shows a rapid increase in disapproval for the Court over the past two-ish years.

That disapproval is largely driven by Democrats and those who lean toward Democrats drastically turning against the Court in the early 2020s.

Look at this chart from Pew — also from early September 2022 — that shows the collapse of Democratic views of the Court.

The proximate cause for the collapse in trust and approval was the June 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v Wade in the country. Democratic favorable views of the Court dropped 18 points in Pew data between January 2022 and September 2022 — a decline directly attributable to the abortion decision.

But, while the steepness of the decline in regards the Court is, without question, because of the abortion decision, it also glosses over broader erosion in public trust in the Court over the past 7 or so years.

If I had to put a precise date on when the Court began changing from admired nonpartisan institution to political entity, I would pick out President Obama’s attempt to confirm Merrick Garland in 2016 — and Republicans’ subsequent refusal to even sit down and meet with him. (That opening was eventually filled by Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee.)

Everything that flowed from that — including the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg in September 2020 and Donald Trump’s ability to appoint three conservative justices — has worked to reinforce the notion that the Court is simply filled with partisans who are carrying out a clear agenda.

It’s also all part of an even wider collapse in trust in American institutions. In 2022, Gallup released its latest trust in institutions poll. The concept is simple — they take 16 major American institutions and ask people how much (or little) trust people have in them.

The results were startling. Of the 16 institutions, 11 measured statistically significant declines year over year. (The 2nd largest decline in trust? Eleven points — on the Supreme Court.) None — not ONE — institution improved in the eyes of the American public.

We are at a moment in American culture where the old leviathans of our lives are eroding. The police, the church, schools, big business and, yes, the media have all given reasons for at least some people to doubt them over the last handful of years.

What’s scary — and the cause of not a little existential dread — is that even as these pillars of our society have begun to erode and collapse, nothing has stepped in to replace them.

We’ve lost faith in virtually every American institution but we haven’t gained faith anywhere. (This includes religious faith as measured by church attendance, which at or near low ebbs historically.)

That leads to a feeling of being adrift without any of the traditional handholds to grasp onto. Which leads to the rise of the likes of Donald Trump, a man promising to fix every problem if only you elect him.

He literally said that.

As Yoni Appelbaum wrote in the Atlantic of Trump back in 2016:

I am your voice, said Trump. I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order. He did not appeal to prayer, or to God. He did not ask Americans to measure him against their values, or to hold him responsible for living up to them. He did not ask for their help. He asked them to place their faith in him.

We are all looking for places to put our faith — and hope — these days. The Supreme Court was once a primary landing spot for those feelings; people believed the nine Justices represented the best of us: Smart, serious and non partisan.

Those days are long gone. And they aren’t coming back.

1. While the Gallup poll came out the day before the landmark abortion ruling, it was already widely known the Court would overturn Roe v Wade — thanks to Politico breaking the news 6 weeks earlier.