Polarization has infected the U.S. court system—from top to bottom
The latest Gallup poll shows that public approval for the Supreme Court has dropped to 39%, the lowest since the polling organization started asking about the high court 25 years ago. That sounds bad, but it’s not statistically different than the low-40s ratings the court has consistently received since 2021, or several times in the mid-2010s, or indeed in 2005. What is significant, however, is the partisan gap. Only 11% of Democrats approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing, while 75% of Republicans do. That 64-point differential exceeds the 61-point gap after the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, as well as the 58-point gap (in Democrats’ favor) after the 2015 Obergefell ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. It’s emblematic of polarized opinions about nearly every institution at a time of overall low societal trust.
And it’s not just the nation’s highest court. A December 2024 poll found Americans’ trust in the judicial system as a whole has hit a record-low 35%, with another large gap between those who supported and opposed the outgoing Biden administration.
The partisan divergence in public attitudes toward the judiciary reflects the perception that judges rule in a partisan or ideological way. After all, nearly all the judges who have ruled against President Donald Trump in the slew of challenges to his executive orders and other administration actions were appointed by Democratic presidents, just as nearly all the judges who ruled against President Joe Biden’s initiatives were appointed by Republican ones. That’s in turn partly a function of forum selection: Trump’s opponents sue in Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., where federal courts skew left, while Biden’s opponents sued in Texas and Florida. But it also represents the culmination of several trends. We’ve reached a point where divergent interpretive theories of constitutional law and statutory interpretation track partisan preference at a time when the parties haven’t been so ideologically distinct since at least the Civil War.
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute.
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