OPINION:
The political left is trumpeting a decline in popular support for the Supreme Court. A recent Gallup Poll shows that popular support for the court has declined from 56% in 2005 (when John Roberts became chief justice) to 40% today. Washington Post writer Ruth Marcus calls this “a perilous trajectory.”
Why has this occurred? The political left suggests this is somehow a reaction to objective factors concerning the quality of the practices and decisions of the court and its members. But this is simply not true. Is there any evidence that the court’s decisions are less well reasoned than those of a decade or two ago?
Today’s court functions much as it always has in modern times. Its oral questioning is sharp and pointed. Its written opinions are clear, well reasoned and based on solid legal grounds. Its clerks are, as usual, drawn largely from our nation’s elite law schools.
Why then the decline in the court’s popular standing? The decline can be traced entirely to one source: nonstop political attacks on the court by left-leaning politicians and their lockstep media allies.
These attacks began when Brett Kavanaugh became the fifth Republican-appointed justice and the left lost its reliable working control of the high court. They increased in volume when Amy Coney Barrett became the sixth Republican-appointed justice. And they grew even louder after last year’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
A decline in popular support for the court derives entirely from one source: Liberals simply do not like the court’s recent major decisions.
Unambiguous evidence of this can be found in another recent poll, which found that the decline in popular support for the court has occurred entirely among Democrats. The view of the court among independents and Republicans remains roughly the same as it always has been in recent decades. A decline in the court’s popularity is a self-fulfilling result of attacks by Democratic politicians and the media.
This is especially obvious because there have been significant cases where Republican-appointed justices have not voted as a bloc but have joined their Democratic-appointed colleagues. The case involving Alabama and the Voting Rights Act is one example. So are cases regarding the power of state legislatures to control federal elections and support for the Indian Child Welfare Act.
It is difficult — impossible, actually — to imagine Democratic-appointed justices joining their Republican-appointed colleagues on major contentious cases.
The latest attack on the court has come from one of the Democratic-appointed justices herself. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has argued that the court today is legislating on political issues, placing itself where the Congress should be.
George Orwell could not have dreamed up an argument more detached from reality. To the contrary, what the majority of the court has been doing is aiming to return major political issues to the Congress where they belong, and expecting Congress to do its work as the Constitution intends.
The self-fulfilling rhetoric of the left is not unique to the court. It is part and parcel of the liberal playbook. Democrats consistently trumpet exaggerated numbers of Americans living in poverty. They consistently trumpet widespread racism in American life. They consistently exaggerate fears over treatment of gays, lesbians and transgender people.
It is not that poverty and racism and other unfortunate attitudes do not exist. They do. But the Democratic playbook magnifies these problems and fears beyond reality. This produces one inevitable result: a decline in Americans’ view of the goodness of their own country.
Where does the idea that America is an evil country come from but continuing hyperbolic Democratic attacks about its injustices?
There should be no surprise when poll results reflect negatively on American institutions like the Supreme Court. This result is created and fueled by attacks designed to achieve exactly this outcome. And thus too, to justify Democratic policy responses — court packing, term-limiting justices and the like — to fix an imaginary problem and expand their political power.
• Jeff Bergner served in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. He is the author of “The Vanishing Congress.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.