The Supreme Court falls to Earth

He Supreme Court he is falling off the pedestal he built for himself, into the mire of normal politics.

Why it matters: This is increasingly how the public sees it. This is how the rest of the political system treats him. And it’s getting harder and harder to believe that judges aren’t interested in wielding that power.

The panorama: Justices worked hard, for a long time, to cultivate the perception that they existed on a high, scholarly plane far above the petty concerns that occupy elected politicians.

• They said the court’s job was completely separate from considerations such as public opinion. Even when they had to tackle a case with political implications, they approached it only as a matter of legal scholarship, not sullied by ideology or political bias.

That image is almost dead.

• When history looks back on the period just ended, what stands out most may not be any particular failure, but rather its place in the trend, which has long simmered but is rapidly accelerating. , towards seeing the court for what it is: the single sentence. most powerful weapon in American politics.

Driving the news: Throughout, the court looks more like run-of-the-mill power politics, driven by results.

• The unprecedented leak of a draft opinion in the abortion case last year was very much the kind of leak that has historically only happened in other parts of government.
• Indeed, so were the leaks about Chief Justice John Roberts flipping his vote to save Obamacare in 2012.
• ProPublica exposed ethics issues this year that would be a real controversy for anyone facing re-election for his powerful job: wealthy Republican donors with court interest paid luxury vacations for judges Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who did not disclose those gifts, ProPublica reported. According to reports, Thomas also sold a family home to Republican donor Harlan Crow.

The judges’ reactions to the controversy have not helped.

• Borrowing a page from the playbook of any decent political operative, Alito tried to get ahead of the story, pre-confronting the ProPublica investigation with a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
• Alito is probably the most willing of all the judges to speak his mind in public. He delivered a speech in 2021 in which he dismissed criticism of the court’s “shadow file” as “range of nonsense“, and used public speeches to criticize COVID restrictions and the broad cultural acceptance of same-sex marriage.

Confirmation hearings they are a circus Start the watch on that trend wherever you want: Robert Bork, Merrick Garland, you take your pick. But we have ended up in a place where the Senate treats the process as the prize fight that it is, not the neutral intellectual pursuit as it was once framed.

• As recently as the Obama administration, Supreme Court nominees still garnered broad bipartisan support. The Democrats put an end to that under the Trump presidency, and it won’t come back.

Between lines: You can even see it, sometimes, in the court deed.

By the numbers: The public is taking notice of all this.

• Only 18% of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in the Supreme Court, in a NORC survey that followed last year’s abortion decision.
• At the same time, 36% said they have little confidence in the court, an increase of more than 10 percentage points in just a few years.

Reality check: The court has not become political.

• An institution with so much power to decide inherently political issues, from voting rights to campaign finance law to matters of life and death, what the federal government can and cannot do, First Amendment limits, even who becomes president. it is, and always has been, a political institution.
• But perception is catching up with that reality.