Most Americans do not currently approve of the way the U.S. Supreme Court is conducting its business, a negative trend that started in 2021, according to the findings of a new Gallup poll.
Americans remain sharply divided along partisan lines on the court’s performance, with Republicans tending to favor the court’s activities and Democrats overwhelmingly opposing them.
Supreme Court reform has recently emerged as an issue in the lead-up to the November elections.
President Joe Biden unveiled a package of proposed reforms on July 29 that he said were needed to combat what he called the “extreme opinions” issued by the court.
“I have great respect for our institutions, the separation of powers laid out in our Constitution,” the president said. “What’s happening now is not consistent with that doctrine of separation of powers. Extremism is undermining the public confidence in the court’s decisions.”
Separation of powers is a constitutional doctrine under which the federal government is divided into three branches—executive, legislative, and judicial. In theory, each branch of government serves as a check on the others.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) responded to the package in a speech on the Senate floor, saying the court “is under attack.”
“Prominent Democrats say it must do what they want and not what the laws and the Constitution require,” he said on the Senate floor.
McConnell added that Democrats have spent the past eight years engaged in “an all-out campaign against the court’s legitimacy—and, ultimately, against its very existence.”
The new research was conducted as the court wrapped up a term in which it issued high-profile decisions including recognizing that a U.S. president has criminal immunity for official acts, protecting access to abortion medication, and reversing a 40-year-old precedent that bolstered the administrative state by requiring courts to defer to unelected bureaucrats’ interpretations of ambiguous laws.
Approval of the Supreme Court among Republicans stands at 66 percent, compared to 15 percent among Democrats and 44 percent among independents, according to the poll.
The 51-percentage-point difference between Republicans and Democrats may be a large partisan gap, but the record, according to Gallup, was a 61-percentage-point gap following the court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022. At that time, Republican approval rose to 74 percent, while Democrat approval fell to 13 percent.
Gallup has been conducting surveys about public approval of the court for a quarter century.
Support for the court peaked at 62 percent in 2000 and 2001. Most Americans continued to approve of the court in almost all surveys conducted from 2000 to 2010, but approval dipped down to 42 percent in 2005 and 2016.
After former President Donald Trump left office in 2021, support fell to 40 percent that year and has not gone higher than 43 percent since then. Trump appointed three justices to the court, which made the court more ideologically conservative.
The Epoch Times contacted the public information office at the Supreme Court for a comment but received no reply by publication time.
The poll results became publicly available after Biden announced proposed reforms, including a constitutional amendment imposing 18-year term limits for justices, who currently enjoy lifetime tenure, along with ethics rules requiring disclosure of gifts and a ban on political activity.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president, has endorsed the plan. Republicans oppose the plan, saying it is unconstitutional and is driven by Democrats’ opposition to the conservative-leaning court’s rulings.
Biden also proposed a constitutional amendment that would overturn the court’s July 1 decision that held Trump was immune from criminal prosecution for actions carried out within the scope of their constitutional authority.
