Two-thirds of Americans want term limits for Supreme Court justices

A new poll out from the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that Americans are rapidly losing confidence in the Supreme Court as an independent arbiter of the nation’s laws in the wake of Roe v Wade’s end.

Many Americans want reforms to the Supreme Court including term limits for justices, who currently get appointed to the bench for life.

The survey shows that public opinion of the Court has fallen off significantly since just a few months ago, when a majority of every age group said they had at least some confidence in the Court and the shares of those who doubted the Court’s legitimacy were much lower.

Now, four in ten Americans overall say they have zero confidence in the Court’s decisionmaking, a number which grows when the results focused on Democratic respondents (64 per cent) and those aged 18-29 (56 per cent). In April, just 27 per cent of Americans had doubts about the Court’s decisionmaking, including less than a third of Democrats.

Now, two thirds of Americans also say that justices should leave the bench after a set number of years, instead of being appointed for life. In fact, majorities of every affiliation want to see an age limit on the bench: No more geriatric justices. 82 per cent of Democrats agree with term limits for justices, as do 57 per cent of Republicans and 51 per cent of independents.

Democrats also want to see the Court’s bench expanded to thwart the conservative stranglehold imposed under the Trump administration which oversaw the confirmations of three justices. 52 per cent of Democrats want the Court expanded, compared to just 14 per cent who oppose that idea. A third of independents and one in ten Republicans support that plan as well.

The Court’s upheaval of federal protections for abortion rights has clearly led to a significant backlash against the Court; complicating that issue for the justices is the question of whether two justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, lied to US Senators during their confirmation process regarding whether they believed Roe v Wade to be a settled precedent. A handful of senators have accused them as much.

That’s hardly the only issue of legitimacy vexing the nation’s highest Court. Another conservative justice, Clarence Thomas, has faced calls for his resignation or impeachment from some Democrats over his wife Ginni Thomas’ apparently deep involvement in Donald Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election after his defeat to Joe Biden.

Mr Thomas did not recuse himself from a case involving whether White House records from the January 6 attack would be turned over to the select congressional committee investigating Mr Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, and was in fact the only justice to vote against those records being turned over. It was later revealed that Ginni Thomas was in contact with White House officials in the days leading up to the attack, and it was previously known that she attended a “Stop the Steal”-themed rally in DC on Jan 6 itself.

Reforms to the nation’s highest court remain highly unlikely under a Biden presidency given the Democrats’ 50-50 majority in the Senate and the opposition to Court reforms from at least two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

The poll from NORC and the AP surveyed 1,085 adults living in the US between 14-17 July. The margin of error was 3.9 percentage points.