The approval rating of the nation’s highest court stands at 40 per cent, according to a new poll

The Supreme Court’s approval rating has plunged to one of its lowest levels yet ahead of a ruling on Donald Trump’s eligibility to run for president.

The approval rating of the nation’s highest court stands at 40 per cent, according to the latest poll released by Marquette Law School on Wednesday.

The latest numbers rival only those of July 2022, when only 38 per cent of US adults said they approved of the Supreme Court and 61 per cent disapproved – just after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.

  • ME5SENGER_24@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Approval ratings mean nothing to lifetime appointments. Nobody should hold a position forever. If they wanna keep them there for life, then at least make them subject to review every X years

    • blargerer@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      Theres only one way to end a lifetime appointment, so they should worry if it gets too low.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        You can impeach them or imprison them too. They only hold their position “in good behavior”.

        • Optional@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Given that Thomas is clearly accepting bribes and his wife is using him to further a coup, I think we can safely assume that means nothing, other than a future weapon against a liberal justice.

          • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            If you get one in prison then I’m pretty sure they’ll get kicked out. Now we just need a Congress with the balls to spend 5 pages defining bribery so the justices can’t wiggle out of it.

        • Zron@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          How do imprison someone who has the money, connections, and legal knowledge to appeal the case all the way up to themselves.

    • thefartographer@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      My wife and I love each other endlessly and agreed to the whole “until death” thing, but we both hold a firm belief that marriage contracts should have an expiration date at which point the couple can step back and evaluate if they want to continue this union. If not, marriage dissolved, bye.

      I hear people say that X isn’t marriage, but I say that nothing should be marriage and EVERYTHING should have a planned expiration date. Except light bulbs, batteries, and puppies.

      • d00phy@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Kittens, too. Really all baby animals. And most baby humans (also animals, I know. Settle down, Internet).

        • thefartographer@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          I don’t see the rabble of the internet coming out in their usual droves to insult you for the babies/animals quip, so I’ll do it for you!

          What the fuck, you donkey!? Don’t you understand how is babby formed??? It happens when girl get pragnent!!!

          • d00phy@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Appreciate it. I was worried the Internet would let me down, there! Glad someone’s carrying the banner!

    • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      9 months ago

      We really need to get these guys out of the office. Why are we caring about impeaching presidents, we need to keep a close eye, catch them doing illegal shit and impeach the supreme court justices. Obviously hold off until the US has a president that can appoint good, fair judges - I don’t believe Trump is capable of that, and Biden is at best borderline capable.

      • ME5SENGER_24@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        There is supposed to be a separation between the 3 governmental branches within the US. Unfortunately, that’s just not reality. Judges should be elected to terms by the people. We are meant to have a government of the people, by the people, for the people. We the people, are the most important pieces of this equation.

        We the people, need to push our agenda on the government instead of the government pushing itself on us.

        I’m not talking about any sovereign citizen craziness. I’m just saying it’s 2024, I can pay for my groceries with my cellphone why can’t I chose how my tax dollars are spent?!

        • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          I think we’re too stupid to put the hands in such concentrated power. But it may work better if every election we have like 2 judge seats that go into a lower court and then you just cycle them through the Supreme Court on rotation. That way it’s harder to bribe a judge and easier to cut them lose if needed.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      It surely does mean something. They don’t have an army to enforce their rulings. They also can get a whole bunch of new judges in. Finally, if a prosecutor gets their shit together they could end up in prison for bribery. And while they can define bribery however they want, see point one.

    • CaptObvious@literature.cafe
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      9 months ago

      two are Cheney’s

      You had it right the first time. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that Cheney was actually calling the shots during those eight years. The only decision I think Bush the Younger actually made was refusing to pardon Scooter Libby.

      • dhork@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Dick Cheney called all the shots, even the ones that found his hunting buddy’s face

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          Let?

          Lol what do you think calling the shots means

          W didn’t let anyone do anything. Dude couldn’t prevent an iraqi shoe flying at his head.

          Tf he gonna do about Cheney?

  • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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    We are rapidly approaching the point where it is an open question as to whether the Supreme Court can make its rulings stick in jurisdictions that don’t fall along the current majority’s ideological bent, and that’s not a place anybody in their right mind wants to go. The question is, are Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett still possessed of enough self-awareness to recognize that and rule accordingly at least some of the time? If not, do Roberts and Gorsuch make a consistent enough voting bloc to swing dicey decisions away from the foaming-at-the-mouth radical right wing of the bench when they might seriously endanger the ongoing credibility of the court as an institution? I’m not super optimistic, but time will tell…

      • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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        Roberts is about as right-wing as the rest of them, but his philosophy was always to boil the frog, so to speak. If he had his way, abortion would still be unprotected and/or illegal, but it would have taken another 10 or 15 years, and been a death of a thousand cuts, none of which would have been the obvious death knell of Roe v. Wade alone. That way, he could have reached his desired end goal without threatening the legitimacy or respectability of the court.

        Gorsuch I do actually have a bit of respect for; he has his principles, even if I don’t always agree with him, and I respect that he has a particular righteous fervor for righting some of the wrongs that America has inflicted on Indian tribes. I just wish that, in the absence of being able to go back in time to 2016 and force the Senate to give Obama’s nominee for his seat an up-or-down vote, that Gorsuch could at least see his way through to being more of a centrist in other ways more often.

          • beardown@lemm.ee
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            Maybe I see Roberts as a centrist because he puts the Court’s legitimacy ahead of his personal politics.

            To dumb it down further It’s really the difference between lawful evil and neutral evil or chaotic evil. Or the difference between longtermism and shortermism.

            Roberts wants ultimate outcomes that are as radically right wing as those desired by Alito. The difference is that Alito wants those outcome to occur now. Roberts wants those outcomes to happen gradually over decades. This is because Roberts is afraid of blowback; Alito is aware of this argument, but he believes that the power of the Supreme Court and the Republican Party has been consolidated so absolutely that such fears of blowback are unreasonable and illusory.

            The metaphor of boiling the frog gradually over a long period Vs dropping the frog into already boiling water is apt. You place a frog into a pot of room temperature water and then gradually turn up the heat until it is boiling. This prevents the frog from jumping out of the pot, something it physically could do at any time, because it doesn’t perceive the graduality of the temperature changes. Alito et al understand the wisdom of slowly boiling the frog; they just believe that the cooking pot we are using is miles deep such that it would be impossible for any frog to jump out - and that we have also chained on a heavy lid to the pot that would also prevent frogs from escaping. We are that frog, and Alito believes that the GOP has fully constructed that enormous pot and lid. Under that worldview, there is no meaningful negative consequence for SCOTUS making drastic revisionist decisions whenever they want. The decisions may radically overturn precedent, but they are nonetheless unchallengeable.

            It is our job as citizens to prove Alito wrong. If we don’t then our standard of living will rapidly deteriorate even more radically than it already has since 1981. SCOTUS will remake the United States completely, and make it an absolute dictatorship of the billionaire. That must be opposed

            • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              The metaphor of boiling the frog gradually over a long period Vs dropping the frog into already boiling water is apt. You place a frog into a pot of room temperature water and then gradually turn up the heat until it is boiling. This prevents the frog from jumping out of the pot, something it physically could do at any time, because it doesn’t perceive the graduality of the temperature changes.

              Ima let you finish, but they’ve done this experiment and the frog jumps out. It also becomes increasingly active as the temperature rises.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

              And frogs are cool so I get sick of the “frog boiling” slander, though I understand the metaphor.

              • beardown@lemm.ee
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                9 months ago

                I understand that it isn’t what is done when cooking frogs. It’s a metaphor, and i used it only for its value of analogy

                • DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  9 months ago

                  You were literally like a bull in a china shop with your response.

                  You were respectful and answered nicely. See Myth Busters. 😉

    • Lemmeenym@lemm.ee
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      We are rapidly approaching the point where it is an open question as to whether the Supreme Court can make its rulings stick in jurisdictions that don’t fall along the current majority’s ideological bent

      Recently the most significant refusals to follow court rulings are in jurisdictions that do agree with the court majority’s ideological bent. Alabama’s voting maps fight and Texas’s current border fight being the two biggest ones. At least for now democrats still generally believe in the American system and respect the rule of law.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 months ago

        The governors of solidly blue states will soon enough have citizens who are going to not put up with it.

        They can try and fail to make a nationwide abortion ban stick on the west coast.

        West coast had an interstate compact during COVID because they knew they could not count on the Feds.

        • beardown@lemm.ee
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          Probably the same thing that happened with Dobbs - ultimately, not much of anything.

          It’s sad. But Americans need to stand up for ourselves.

          When SCOTUS abolishes Chevron deference later this year and consequently destroys the federal bureaucracy we will be finished. Hopefully the FBI can lean on SCOTUS to prevent that, though it is doubtful they are astute enough to perceive Chevron’s destruction for the national security disaster that it is

    • Optional@lemmy.world
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      There’s a reason for it. We may have made the need for it meaningless, but the reasoning is sound.

      • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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        The functional part (avoiding incentivizing corruption) could be handled just as well by giving them lifelong pay (and financial reporting). The winds of justice being determined by when an old person dies is not a necessary feature.

        • JonEFive@midwest.social
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          They could also be limited to serving for say 10 years without the possibility of a second term. Effectively very similar to a lifetime appointment. There’s no re-election so they don’t have to rule on cases in a political manner. This doesn’t solve the problem of approval rating being completely meaningless, but at least there’s some limit on insanity.

      • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        It wasn’t, really. We need to stop attributing some kind of infinite foresight and wisdom to the authors of the constitution. The Supreme Court was a bad idea poorly implemented, the senate as the superior house was a fucking terrible idea, and the independent executive is not defensible at this point.

        The authors (who, let’s remember, were working with a 17th century philosophy on the nature of humankind that has since been discredited) were operating on entirely different premises, for an entirely different country, and balancing things like slavery and freedom and democracy versus rule by the elite (the elite were justified to rule by their identity as being elites) by trying to come to a middle ground compromise on those and related issues. It’s really kind of crap by modern democratic, political, and philosophical standards. The only reason it hasn’t been addressed is that we’ve become self-aware enough that we’re terrified that US democracy has fallen to the point that we could only do worse than 18th century slaveholders, landlords, and wealthy lawyers.

        To make it explicit, the authors thought that a) the rich would put the country’s interests ahead of their own, b) that selfishness would mean people wanted to protect their branch of government rather than their party, and c) that part b would be a sufficient bulwark against demagoguery. They believed in a world where men (and I mean men, specifically, and rich men in particular) were rational actors who would act in their own self-interest.

        Don’t get me wrong - they were reading the scholars of their time - but if political and social science hasn’t made advances in the past three centuries we should probably just give it up.

    • kase@lemmy.world
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      The Supreme Court’s approval rating has plunged to one of its lowest levels yet…

      Emphasis mine, ofc. I don’t disagree that it’s worded awkwardly… I was wondering the same thing as you until I reread it several times. ¯⁠\⁠(⁠°⁠_⁠o⁠)⁠/⁠¯

  • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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    Well, yeah half the court was appointed through nebulous means, and they’ve been slowly throwing out things considered settled law that’s been on the books for literal decades. No shit that people have no faith in the legitimacy of the court anymore.

    At this point I think we should ignore any and all rulings they make until we fix the system that brought this bullshit on.

  • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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    9 months ago

    When five out of nine have been appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, that’s what you’ll get.

    Of course, we have no way of removing any of them, so it’s not like they have to care.

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        Just appoint 10 additional supreme court judges. Then pass federal law to limit adding more supreme court judges. Pass federal laws to fix all of the shit that has been happening, including voting reform and gerrymandering with a better voting system A second reconstruction era.

        It would be easy to fix, all the democrats need is a solid majority which they would get on election reform or abortion alone.

        • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          they should have. They could have. People said this… like when RvW was on the chopping block.

          But no. “We can’t do that because then they’d do it!”

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          The problem with federal law is that the next Congress can ignore it. Never forget Congress writes the laws and that means there’s functionally no way to bind a future Congress short of the Constitution.

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        That’s not viable. It requires getting a bunch of Republicans to agree to it, and getting even one Republican to listen to reason is a rare thing.

    • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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      To be fair, Bush had won the popular vote by the time he nominated any justices.

      • Riccosuave@lemmy.world
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        Yes, but he wouldn’t have even been president in the first place if it wasn’t for the Supreme Court, and specifically Clarence Thomas.

        • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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          True. And he had an incumbency advantage in 2004. I was just pointing out that Bush’s appointments weren’t as simple as “he didn’t win the popular vote.”

          • Drusas@kbin.social
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            Right, but he wouldn’t have even been running in 2004 if he hadn’t been handed the presidency in 2000.

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        He won the popular vote by taking the country into an unjustified war because he has daddy issues.

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    Unfortunately, they could have a 0% approval rating and we’d still never get the 2/3rds majority in congress to do fuckall about it. This supreme court will continue to pander to corporate and donor interests and act wholly without ethics because our system was built on the concept that people in those roles would act with integrity and utterly falls apart when people on the supreme court flagrantly disregard their responsibility to citizens and act in their own interests.

      • n1ckn4m3@kbin.social
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        Can’t say I disagree. When you fight a cheater by playing 100% by the rules in a world where cheating isn’t punished, you lose every time. This pretty much sums up the last 40 years of the Democratic party.

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          Don’t forget the idiocy of playing as center-right as possible by running the most milquetoast candidates possible. Every time. Still, actually.

        • the post of tom joad@sh.itjust.works
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          Yes, one starts to wonder after 40 years of it’s not by design. How much does it cost to get a politician not to do something i wonder? Probably pretty cheap since hey, how would you prove it when nothing happened?

          I know I’m just talking shit but i kinda get the feeling after watching them fail for decades that maybe they aren’t the hapless helpless rule of law guys they’d prefer we thought them as. Which is more likely? It just doesn’t pass the smell test

      • JonEFive@midwest.social
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        Well, let’s reelect him and see what happens. I don’t think he’ll do it but I’d think it’s more likely when he isn’t worried about Trump winning if the move turns out to be more unpopular than expected.

          • DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            Jeff Jackson of NC but the Republicans were able to gerrymander his district so that he had very little chance of winning a second term in the US House. He’s not quite ready for primetime but watch for him in 10 years or so.

            • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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              AoC, Bernie. Pelosi (though her husband’s stock trading is a little too… suspicious.) even Michelle Obama might be better.

              • DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                AoC folded many times for stupid things when Nancy Pelosi wanted it (crocodile tears were shed).

                Bernie hasn’t called what is happening in Gaza a genocide- would continue supporting it like Biden more than likely.

                Michele Obama is an unknown but is tainted by Barack Obama’s legacy (drone strikes) and anti-constitutional moves.

                Now, could they energize Democrats? Possibly.

    • Crikeste@lemm.ee
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      And yet American criticize everyone but themselves. It’s almost as if the American populace has had their heads filled with nonsense propaganda and they couldn’t even tell you a single real truth about the world outside of America.

  • TengoHipo@lemm.ee
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    They are all in someone’s pocket. How can we approve of them. They make horrible decisions as of late.

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    Shit, they are so screwed when they have to go up for election again…

    Wait, what?