Despite backing the high court’s decision to block a major policy priority for the president, polls show Americans still see the Supreme Court as a defensive play in hopes of averting a constitutional crisis.
WASHINGTON (CN) – Too often out of sight and out of mind, public opinion of the Supreme Court is being infected by the partisanship and polarization that plagues American politics, according to a new poll out Thursday.
The court’s approval is on a downward slope based on a national poll by Marquette Law School, with only 43% of respondents giving the justices high marks. The poll found that Americans rarely pay attention to the court, but when they do, partisan politics takes over.
As President Donald Trump’s opinions have worsened during his second term, so has the public’s opinion of the court. In March 2025, approval of how the Supreme Court was handling its work was at 54%, but fell by more than 10% as justices routinely ruled to uphold administration policies.
Over the past year, Trump has flooded the Supreme Court’s emergency docket with appeals as lower courts moved to block the administration’s policies. Legal experts warned that approving Trump’s wishes, even temporarily, would embolden the president and lead to an endless cycle of hasty and incomplete decisions.
By fall, the White House was boasting victories on a variety of issues including a military ban on transgender people, DEPORTATION, DEI funding cuts, mass shootings and more.
But in the new year, the Supreme Court handed the administration a huge loss, striking Trump’s one-man tariff war. The president has since attacked the court and individual judges over the decision.
On Tuesday night, Trump complained about the resulting refunds the government must pay businesses and attacked his nominees — Judges Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch — for ruling against him.
“I put some people on the United States Supreme Court who completely misrepresented who they were and the true ideology they stood for!” Trump wrote on his page on social networks.
But Thursday’s poll shows most Americans have a favorable view of the Supreme Court’s fee ruling, and only 33% of respondents disapproved of the decision. Democrats expressed the greatest approval at 92%, but 73% of independents also favored the decision. By contrast, 61% of Republicans were opposed.
According to the poll, the more Americans heard or read about the decision, the more partisan their views became. Republicans with little knowledge about the decision were evenly split, but those with a lot of knowledge were 70% against. The same reverse trend occurred with independents, with the knowledge group favoring the decision by 90% but only 69% of the lack of knowledge group approving.
Democrats were the standout, with little change in approval of the decision across the spectrum of news consumers.
Overall, the public is largely in the dark about the work of the Supreme Court, with only 26% reporting hearing or reading a lot about it in the past month.
The poll tied partisan opinions on Trump’s tariffs with approval of the Supreme Court decision. Over 70% of tariff supporters also disapproved of the decision, while only 11% of tariff opponents opposed the decision.
Some court watchers attributed Trump’s shadow win to the justices’ efforts to avoid him the constitutional crisis scenario in which the president refuses to follow a Supreme Court decision. Even after the Supreme Court’s fee ruling, the public still believes the court is doing everything it can to avoid such conflict, with 57% of respondents supporting this view.
Opinions on the court’s conflict avoidance fall along a similar divide to the fee decision, with Democrats and independents largely believing the justices are careful while Republicans are not.
More legal experts predict that Trump will face another major Supreme Court loss birthright citizenship. Even the president himself predicts this result.
“Their decision on tariffs was an unnecessary and expensive slap in the face for the US and a giant victory for its adversaries,” Trump said. writes in another post on Wednesday. “If they rule against our country on birthright citizenship, which they probably will, it will be even worse, if that’s even possible. It will cost America massive amounts of money, but more importantly, it will cost America its DIGNITY! No, the Radical Left Democrats don’t need to ‘pack the Court’, it’s already full!”
According to the poll, a majority would support that outcome, with 69% marking their approval. Republicans are divided over Trump’s executive order targeting birthright citizenship, but independents and Democrats largely oppose it.
of Trump attempt to shoot Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook drew similar bipartisan endorsements. Survey respondents were divided, however, on how judges should rule postal ballot deadlines regardless of polarized political views on the issue.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on birthright citizenship, Cook’s impeachment and mail-in ballots in the coming months.
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