UPenn Constitutional Law Professor Outlines Declining Public Opinion Of The Supreme Court

2 months ago

Constitutional Law Professor Kermit Roosevelt joins Forbes Senior Editor Maggie McGrath on "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss the public opinion of the Supreme Court.

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Transcript

00:00And I want to talk to you about recent polling, and when I say recent, it's not just this year,

00:04this is a trend that's been brewing over the past several years, show that the American public

00:10doesn't have the most favorable view of the Supreme Court. And that's a big change from

00:16when I was a kid and 10, 20, 30 years ago. What was the precipitating factor in your view in the

00:23decline in public opinion of the Supreme Court? And is it ever likely to go back to more neutral

00:30uncontroversial territory? Well, I think there's a pretty clear answer as to why the American public

00:37views the Supreme Court as negatively as it does. And part of it has to do with the ethical

00:42violations, which are just a bad look. I mean, whatever you think about what effect it has on

00:48his decisions, and I think probably the effect is pretty small, if it exists at all. It just

00:53looks very bad for Justice Thomas to be going on these fancy vacations with the multibillionaires

00:58who actually have interest in cases before the court. So that's bad. That's one thing. I think

01:04what's more important is that the Supreme Court looks more and more as though it's representing

01:11a pretty extreme ideology that's held by a pretty small minority of the American people. So the

01:17Supreme Court looks like it's out of step with mainstream American public opinion and also

01:24mainstream American constitutional thinking. And there's a reason for that, which is that you've

01:30got this 6-3 supermajority, even though Republicans lost five of the last eight elections. And if

01:37you've been following the presidential elections, we should have, in fact, a 6-3 Democratic majority.

01:43So what that means is the Supreme Court is pretty far away, six justices away, from where it would

01:50have been if we'd been giving each president two appointments per four-year term. And the last

01:55time it was this far away, so this is almost unprecedented in American history, the last time

02:00it was this far away was when it decided the Dred Scott case in 1858. So I think there's a lesson to

02:08be taken from this, which is when the Supreme Court gets too far away from mainstream American public

02:14opinion, it starts to advance views that the American people don't like. And understandably,

02:20they react against that. I just got goosebumps because that indicates to me that some of the

02:26more unpopular decisions, not just from this term, obviously, we saw the outcry over the

02:30Chevron case, but if you go back two years to Dobbs, Roe v. Wade could still be law if

02:37these reforms had taken place, in your view? Yes, yes, absolutely.

UPenn Constitutional Law Professor Outlines Declining Public Opinion Of The Supreme Court

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