There’s only one type of American who still trusts the Supreme Court

A new Gallup poll finds public approval of the Supreme Court falling below 40 percent for the first time in the poll’s history. The poll aligns with many others, which have shown public support for the Supreme Court collapsing since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s 2020 confirmation gave Republicans a 6-3 supermajority on the high Court.

One of the Gallup poll’s most significant, if unsurprising, findings is that there is also an unprecedented partisan gap in public approval of the Court. Republicans give the justices high marks, while the Court is slightly more popular than venereal disease among Democrats:

This partisan gap is more or less what any close observer of the justices would predict, given the Court’s recent behavior. Last year, the Republican justices ruled that Donald Trump has broad immunity from prosecution — so broad, in fact, that the GOP justices even determined that Trump may order the Justice Department to prosecute his perceived enemies “for an improper purpose.” 

Similarly, since Trump returned to power last January, the Court has blocked more than a dozen lower court decisions that limited Trump’s ability to act unilaterally. Some of these decisions are blockbusters. In June’s Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D., for example, the Republican justices effectively neutralized the Convention Against Torture, which prohibits the United States from deporting immigrants to nations where they may be tortured. In July’s McMahon v. New York, the Republican justices permitted Trump to fire nearly half of the Department of Education’s workers — in what Education Secretary Linda McMahon called “the first step on the road to a total shutdown” of the entire department.

The same justices who treat Trump as the special favorite of the laws, moreover, have also treated prominent liberal litigants as outside the law’s protection. In Medina v. Planned Parenthood, for example, the Republican justices effectively repealed a law permitting Medicaid patients to choose their own health providers after some of those patients chose Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider and Republican bête noire.

In fairness, not all polls show the Court is currently at its all-time low point. A recent Fox News poll, for example, shows approval of the justices bottoming out in July 2024, the same month that the Republican justices ruled that the leader of their political party has broad immunity from criminal law. Fox’s poll shows public approval of the Court rising this July from its post-Trump immunity low. (Although Fox News is closely aligned with the GOP, its polls are well-respected and generally viewed as reliable.)

Still, while individual polls disagree about whether the Court is unpopular or historically unpopular, the broader trend of voters losing faith in the Court as it aligns itself more closely with the Republican Party has been apparent in polling data for quite some time.

The Supreme Court’s partisan turn is a fairly recent development

When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, the Court had distinct “liberal” and “conservative” blocs, but it would not be fair to describe it as partisan. Two Republican appointees, Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter, typically voted with the Court’s liberal bloc. Justice Anthony Kennedy, another Republican, voted with the conservative bloc on most issues, but also held moderate views on abortion and frequently supported gay rights.

But that era has passed. Obama replaced Stevens and Souter with his own appointees. Trump replaced Kennedy with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a much more hardline conservative. Now, the best predictor of how each justice will vote in politically charged cases is whether they were appointed by a Democrat or a Republican.

In the past, American presidents often paid surprisingly little attention to their justices’ ideologies — President Woodrow Wilson, for example, appointed the reactionary Justice James Clark McReynolds largely because he found McReynolds obnoxious and wanted to get the man (who was serving as Wilson’s attorney general) out of the cabinet.

The two parties, moreover, often didn’t hold consistent views on the types of issues that come before the courts. Some of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s justices, for example, were segregationists — a view that put them at odds with the Democratic Party’s liberal views on race under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Republican President George H.W. Bush, who appointed archconservative Justice Clarence Thomas, was such an enthusiastic supporter of reproductive freedom when he was in Congress that his nickname was “Rubbers,” a reference to condoms.

Beginning in the Reagan administration, however, the Republican Party started producing lengthy documents laying out what Republicans did and did not believe judges should do. They also worked with ideologically aligned organizations like the Federalist Society to vet potential nominees to ensure that their judges shared the party’s vision.

Democrats, meanwhile, do not have the same formal structures to evaluate potential Supreme Court nominees, but they’ve been no less successful in choosing justices who share the Democratic Party’s approach to governance. The last Democratic Supreme Court appointee to break with the party on abortion, for example, was Justice Byron White — a Kennedy appointee who joined the Court in 1962.

So it is no surprise that, after decades of both parties appointing carefully vetted partisans to the Supreme Court, public approval of the Court now aligns with voters’ political party. The American people correctly perceive that the Supreme Court has become a partisan institution, and that perception is now apparent in polling data.