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Tag: samuel alito
U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court's Approval Rating Drops To Lowest Level Ever

More than two years of highly unpopular decisions and months of exposés detailing scandals and alleged corruption has eroded the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval to its lowest level ever in the years in which Gallup has been tracking it. It dropped from 62 percent in 2000, the first year of the survey, to just 40 percent today. It had a 58 percent approval rating in 2020, before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and the installation of Donald Trump’s appointee, Amy Coney Barrett. It’s been mostly downhill for the court’s approval since.

The court has been on a spree of unprecedented and radical actions over the last two and a half years, reversing decades of court precedent on abortion, voting rights, civil rights, environmental protection, executive authority, labor law—you name it, up to and including the foundational principles of the Constitution. If the court could reverse a century’s worth of progress in some arena of our public and private lives, they’d do it. For the first year of Trump-appointee dominance on the court, they didn’t even bother to hold hearings on a lot of it. They just tore up decades of progress in the “emergency” or “shadow docket,” where they could do it anonymously and with absolutely no transparency.

Those actions clearly had an effect on the court’s approval rating. There was a brief blip of increased approval—up to 43% in 2022—that was erased this year by the onslaught of scandals and apparent corruption by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

That includes extensive ProPublica reporting on Thomas: the luxurious vacations, the real estate deals including his mother living rent- and mortgage-free in her newly renovated home, and the private school tuition for Thomas’ nephew, all from Harlan Crow, a billionaire mega-donor to the Republican Party. That’s without even considering the involvement of Thomas’ wife, Ginni, in the January 6 insurrection.

Alito hasn’t escaped ProPublica’s investigative eye either. It reported on his private, luxurious, and all-expense-paid fishing trip in which he hung out with a hedge fund manager who has had business before the Supreme Court, cases he heard and ruled on. Other outlets have followed its lead. CNN has investigated Alito’s celebration of overturning abortion rights with his all-expenses paid trip to Rome. Alito’s efforts to slap back at those stories and declare, incorrectly, that he is beyond the reach of Congress aren’t likely to resonate with any neutral observer among the public.

The court isn’t elected, so what the people think of them isn’t of direct concern to the justices. However, the people who have the power to regulate the court are elected, and thus have every interest in dealing with the problem. So perhaps the justices shouldn’t be too smug about their untouchability.

If any of them (cough, Chief Justice John Roberts, cough) truly care about the institution, they’ll see the threat to it in the growing lack of confidence and trust in the court, particularly right now when the rule of law in the nation is on such precarious ground thanks to an insurrectionist former president.

That’s where Roberts might take note of this new result from Gallup because it surveyed his personal approval rating for the first time in eight years. His approval has been relatively flat for the last decade, and now he sits at 43 percent approval. What’s changed is the chunk of the population that is paying enough attention to the court, and to Roberts, to have an opinion about him. In 2015, 44 percent of respondents simply didn’t know enough about him to weigh in with an opinion. This month, that was down to 27 percent.

If you’re a chief justice of the Supreme Court, you don’t want your work to be rising to the level of general public scrutiny. You’re better off with the court not making so much news—particualrly bad news—that more people are paying attention. You really don’t want that ahead of an election year in which your court and its lack of ethics is going to be a key issue.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Can The Supreme Court's Ratings Sink Lower? They Just Did

Can The Supreme Court's Ratings Sink Lower? They Just Did

The U.S. Supreme Court notched yet another all-time low in its approval rating, this time in a Quinnipiac University poll.

The survey found that a 54 percent majority of Americans disapprove of the way the Supreme Court is handling its job, while just 35% approve.

Registered voters expressed nearly the same level of discontent at 36 percent approval and 55 percent disapproval—the lowest job approval among registered voters in the survey since Quinnipiac began asking the question in 2004.

It's yet another new low for a court that has seen its reputation take an abrupt nosedive ever since it overturned a 50-year precedent on abortion rights this summer.

In June, Gallup found public confidence in the high court had sunk to just 25 percent, a historic all-time low since Gallup began tracking the measure in 1973. Confidence in the court stood at 45 percent in that May '73 survey, taken just months after the high court had established a constitutional right to abortion in its January ruling on Roe v. Wade.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Evangelical Pastor: 'Stealth Missionaries'  Corrupted The Supreme Courto (VIDEO)

Evangelical Pastor: 'Stealth Missionaries'  Corrupted The Supreme Courto (VIDEO)

The Rev. Rob Schenck was once deeply involved in the Christian right movement and white evangelical efforts to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the evangelical Protestant minister has grown increasingly critical of the Christian right and the anti-abortion movement that he was once a part of.

Moreover, he is speaking out against the Christian right’s campaign to lobby Supreme Court justices in the 2014 case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.

Schenck alleges that evangelical Christian fundamentalists knew what the High Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby would be before that decision was publicly announced, and that the leak came from either Justice Samuel Alito or his wife — an allegation that Justice Alito has vehemently denied. And Schenck discussed that allegation when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, December 8.

The Independent’s Alex Woodward, reporting on Schenck’s testimony, explains, “An evangelical minister and former longtime anti-abortion activist told members of Congress that he helped recruit wealthy conservative donors to serve as ‘stealth missionaries’ at the U.S. Supreme Court, where they developed friendships with conservative justices that aligned with the group’s ‘social and religious’ views. The ‘overarching’ goal of Robert Schenck’s ‘Operation Higher Court’ sought to ‘gain insight into the conservative justices’ thinking and to shore up their resolve to render solid, unapologetic opinions,’ he told the House Judiciary Committee in sworn testimony on 8 December.”

Operation Higher Court was the lobbying campaign of Faith and Action, the Christian right group that Schenck was a part of for many years.

Woodward notes that Schenck “testified to the Committee that his group suggested tactics like meeting with justices for meals at their homes and at private clubs to build relationships and advance their perceived common objectives.”

Schenck told House Judiciary Committee members, “I believe we pushed the boundaries of Christian ethics and compromised the High Court’s promise to administer equal justice. I humbly apologize to all I failed in this regard. Most of all, I beg the pardon of the folks I enlisted to do work that was not always transparently honest.… I’m here today in the interest of truth telling.”

The December 8 hearing wasn’t strictly about Burwell v. Hobby Lobby or Operation Higher Court’s campaign to influence Supreme Court justices. It was about Supreme Court ethics in general, and Schenck now believes that it was unethical for Supreme Court justices to be interacting with Christian right lobbyists.

Watch the video of Schenck’s December 8 testimony below or at this link.


Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

House Judiciary Panel Will Investigate 'Troubling' Charges Against Justice Alito

House Judiciary Panel Will Investigate 'Troubling' Charges Against Justice Alito

The Rev. Rob Schenck, an evangelical pastor and former anti-abortion activist, alleges that back in 2014, he learned of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby weeks before the decision was formally announced — and that he heard about it from evangelical donors and lobbyists Donald and Gayle Wright, who allegedly discussed the case with Justice Samuel Alito and his wife.

The bombshell allegation that Alito or his wife leaked the High Court’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling comes at a time when public trust in the Court has reached record lows and the Court is still facing widespread condemnation for its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade after 49 years. And the House Judiciary Committee, on Thursday, December 1, announced that it plans to hold a December 8 hearing that will probe Alito’s alleged leak in the Hobby Lobby case.

Journalist Paul Blumenthal, in HuffPost, reports, “The Committee’s announced hearing follows a back-and-forth between the two top committee Democrats overseeing the courts, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA), and the Court over the lobbying campaign and the Court’s lack of a binding ethics code. The two lawmakers concluded that the Court refused to answer their questions and threatened to provide the oversight that the Court was not doing for itself.”

Alito has flatly denied that either him or his wife discussed the Court’s Hobby Lobby decision in advance with Donald and Gayle Wright. And Gayle Wright has also denied Schenk’s allegation, saying that it is “patently not true.”

Nonetheless, Sheldon and Johnson believe that Schenk’s allegation needs to be thoroughly investigated. In a statement, the Democratic lawmakers wrote, “If the Court.... is not willing to undertake fact-finding inquiries into possible ethics violations, that leaves Congress as the only forum.”

Blumenthal notes that “a coalition of more than 60 progressive groups, including Demand Justice, Planned Parenthood (and) NARAL Pro-Choice” sent a letter to Whitehouse and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin urging them to hold hearings in the Senate and ask Schenck to testify. The reporter quotes Demand Justice President Brian Fallon as saying, “This scandal is just the latest in a long line of ethical failures the Court itself refuses to deal with. House Judiciary is right to move quickly to investigate, and Senate Democrats should plan to take up the mantle in the new year.”

If Democratic leaders in Congress hold hearings on Schenck’s Hobby Lobby allegations in 2023, it will be in the U.S. Senate rather than the U.S. House of Representatives — as Democrats narrowly lost their House majority in the 2022 midterms but held their majority in the Senate and may even expand that majority if Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock defeats Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a runoff election in Georgia on Tuesday, December 6. The new GOP-led House will be seated on January 3, 2023; Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York has been chosen as House minority leader, and the current House minority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, is hoping to become House Speaker.

In a speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday night, November 30, Whitehouse said of the Supreme Court, “We will continue to pursue oversight, including oversight into these latest troubling allegations. The people of the country deserve real answers from justices we trust to wield the power of the highest court in the country. We won’t give up until we get those answers. So, across the street over there, they had better get used to it.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.