Poll: Supreme Court's approval rating falls to 44%
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The Supreme Court's approval ratings have dipped to a new low of 44 percent, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll.
Three out of every four respondents felt that the justices were sometimes unable to put aside their personal or political opinions when making decisions, Slate reported.
The court's favorability reached 66 percent in 1980, according to the New York Times, and has been as high as 80 percent in 1994, Politico reported.
A Pew Research survey last month found that approval for SCOTUS had dipped to 54 percent.
“The results of this and other recent polls call into question two pieces of conventional wisdom,” Lee Epstein, who teaches law and political science at the University of Southern California, told the Times. One is that the court’s approval rating has been stable over the years, according to Epstein, and the other is that it has been consistently higher than that of the other branches of government.
The court's pending health care law decision may greatly influence the public's opinion: more than two-thirds of those polled hope that the SCOTUS overturns some or all of the 2010 health care law when it rules, according to the Times.
Of those surveyed about the healthcare legislation, 41 percent expect the court to overturn the entire law, 27 percent say the justices will reject only the individual mandate, and 24 percent say the court will uphold the law, the Hill reported.
Regardless of which way they believe the vote will go, more than half of respondents "say the justices will reach that conclusion based on their own views, and not legal analysis," according to the Hill.
“As far as the Supreme Court goes, judgments can’t be impersonal,” Vicki Bartlett, an independent voter from Washington stat, told the Times. “When you make judgments, it’s always personal. But the best hope is that they will do their job within the legal parameters.”
This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.
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