Partisanship Drives Down Supreme Court Approval

This from the Huffington Post:

The American public's faith in government continues to decline.

President Barack Obama's job approval rating currently stands at 47 percent, Gallup reported. However, nearly as many respondents said they disapproved of the president's actions.

The reputation of Congress is practically in the gutter, treading water at 17 percent in April. That was a slight improvement from February, when approval of the lawmakers in D.C. reached a record low of 10 percent.

Now the people have weighed in on the justices of the high court, and the report isn't stellar. According to a new poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS News, just 44 percent of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing.
 
Three-quarters said the nine justices sometimes decided cases based on their personal or political views, rather than along constitutional lines. Only 1 in 8 Americans said the justices decided cases based solely on legal analysis, The New York Times reported.

Sixty percent of Americans also agreed with the statement that "appointing Supreme Court justices for life is a bad thing because it gives them too much power." Only one-third said that life tenure for justices was "a good thing because it helps keep them independent from political pressures."

Back in 1994, the court's approval rating hit an all-time high of 80 percent, The Associated Press reported. Such a drastic change in less than two decades could be attributed to the changing makeup of the court, particularly after the ideologically divided 5-to-4 decisions in Bush v. Gore, which determined the 2000 presidential election, and Citizens United, the 2010 decision that gave unlimited campaign spending rights to corporations and unions.

Whether the upcoming decision on the Obama administration's health care overhaul has an impact on the public's view of the court remains to be seen.