Supreme Court leak shakes trust in yet another American pillar
WASHINGTON
Is there a new American motto: In nothing we trust?
By lots of measures, most in the U.S. lack much confidence in large institutions and have for years. Congress? Two big thumbs down. The presidency? Ehh. Americans are also distrustful of big business, unions, public schools and organized religion. Indeed, they hold abysmal views of the functioning of democracy itself.
The Supreme Court has been something of an exception. The one branch of government not dependent on public opinion has traditionally enjoyed higher public esteem than the branches elected by the people. Its above-the-fray reputation, cultivated with exquisite care, once served it well.
Now the justices face a reckoning over the audacious leak of an early draft opinion that strikes down the constitutional right to abortion, an episode that has deepened suspicions that the high court, for all its decorum, is populated by politicians in robes.
Republican members of Congress are suggesting a sinister left-wing plot to derail the outcome of the final decision. Liberals are alleging machinations from the right to lock the justices into their preliminary vote. For all that speculation, neither side knows who leaked the draft to Politico and why.
What’s clear is that the affair has popped a deferential bubble around the court.
“My confidence in the court has been rocked,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the few Republican senators in favor of abortion rights, said with alarm. Vice President Kamala Harris accused the justices of mounting a “direct assault on freedom” if they vote as they signaled. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., accused Trump-nominated justices of lying to Congress about their abortion views in their hearings.
Elected officials do not normally talk this way about the justices. But now, it seems, the jurists are fair game, just another contingent of power players in the Washington viper pit.
In contrast, after mounting a fierce legal fight to settle the implausibly close 2000 election, Democrat Al Gore held back his grievances about political taint on the court when it crushed his hopes in a decision that made Republican George W. Bush the president.
In the years since, Democrats gutted the filibuster on one front to help them populate the lower federal courts with as many liberal judges as possible, knowing they were setting a precedent that could bite them in the future.
Then Republicans did the same for Supreme
Court nominees in the judicial equivalent of nuclear escalation.
And there was Donald Trump. During his presidency, Trump specialized in what’s known by the political class as saying the quiet part out loud. This included his sizing up the judiciary as a political beast, made up of Democratic judges or Republican ones.
For the justices, who have long cloaked themselves in the notion that the politics ends once they ascend to the bench, it was a step too far when Trump accused “Obama judges” of standing in his way and otherwise disparaged judges he didn’t like.
“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in an unusual statement rebuking Trump’s comments. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
Yet people in the United States, in recent times, have grown suspicious about judicial independence, with a strong majority believing justices should keep their political views out of their decisions but not even 1 in 5 polled believing they do an excellent or good job of that.
In an Associated PressNORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll last month, only 18% of U.S. adults said they have a “great deal” of confidence in the Supreme Court. About 27% have hardly any confidence in it.
The high court has historically received better ratings than the other branches and that remains so. In the most recent poll, just 4% have a great deal of confidence in Congress; 51% have hardly any. And 36% have hardly any confidence in the executive branch.
In September, a Gallup poll found 54% said those surveyed had at least a
“fair amount” of confidence in the court, down from 67% in 2020. Only one other time in five decades has that confidence fallen below 60%.