Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was already facing difficult questions about an intensifying ethics controversy when the court received another round of bad news this morning.
Politico reported that another far-right jurist, Justice Neil Gorsuch, spent nearly two years looking for a buyer for a Colorado property he co-owned, and just nine days after his confirmation, he found one: “The chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court,” purchased Gorsuch’s 40-acre tract of land.
Gorsuch, the article added, “did not disclose the identity of the purchaser” on his federal disclosure forms.
Is it any wonder public confidence in the high court is deteriorating? The New Republic noted yesterday:
Nearly two-thirds of Americans don’t have confidence in the Supreme Court, a report released Monday found, an all-time low. … A poll conducted by NPR, PBS NewsHour, and the Marist Institute for Public Opinion found that 62 percent of Americans say they have not very much confidence or no confidence at all in the Supreme Court. This is the lowest number since this poll was first conducted in 2018, when almost twice as many people said they had confidence in the court.
If these results were an outlier, it might be easier to discard them, but the opposite is true. As we recently discussed, Americans increasingly believe the Supreme Court has been politicized. In 2021, a national Grinnell College/Selzer poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans agree that politics drives Supreme Court rulings. In fact, the usual partisan divisions were unimportant: Democrats, Republicans and independents all answered the same question in roughly the same way.
“This is a nightmare scenario for Chief Justice John Roberts, who has sought to protect the court’s reputation as an apolitical institution,” Grinnell College National Poll Director Peter Hanson said at the time. “The court faces a public convinced that its decisions are about politics rather than the Constitution.”
A year later, the public’s opinion of the high court sunk even lower, following a series of reactionary, far-right rulings, including the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Now, there’s evidence that the institution’s standing is even worse.
What’s more, it’s not just the rulings. With increasing frequency, sitting justices — most notably Samuel Alito — deliver provocative speeches with an unmistakable political bent. When the Federalist Society held an event last fall in celebration of its 40th anniversary, four sitting justices were on hand to lend their support to the unabashedly conservative organization. (Alito declared at the gathering, “Boy, is your work needed today.”)
Roberts has responded with frustration in recent months to criticisms of the court’s integrity. But as the court’s troubles mount, it’s up to the chief justice to take steps to get his house in order. What he’ll do — and whether he’s prepared to even try — remains to be seen.
This post revises our related earlier coverage.
