Confidence in Supreme Court lowest in 50 years: survey

Confidence in the Supreme Court has reached its lowest level in 50 years, according to a long-running survey.

Only 17 percent of respondents said they had a great deal of confidence in the high court in 2022, down from 26 percent the year before, according to the General Social Survey, run by NORC at the University of Chicago.

There also was a large jump in the share of respondents who said they had hardly any confidence in the Supreme Court, which rose from 21 percent in 2021 to 35 percent in 2022.

The largest portion of those surveyed — 43 percent — said they had “only some” confidence in the court. However, this represented a decrease from 53 percent in 2021.

Republicans and Democrats split drastically on their views of the Supreme Court in the past year. While 26 percent of Republicans surveyed said they had a great deal of confidence in the court in 2022, only 9 percent of Democrats said the same. 

In 2021, there was only a 3-point difference between the two sides on the issue, with 25 percent of Democrats and 28 percent of Republicans expressing confidence in the court.

The survey comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s historic decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last June, which triggered over a dozen abortion bans at the state level.

More recently, the high court has faced calls for new ethics rules following ProPublica’s reporting on Justice Clarence Thomas’s close relationship with GOP megadonor Harlan Crow. Crow reportedly paid for several luxury vacations with Thomas, which the justice did not disclose.