Voters Concerned by the Power of Unelected Judges and the Recent Impact of SCOTUS, Support Reforms

By Molly Coleman and Isa Alomran

As the 2023 Supreme Court term comes to a close, people throughout the United States are asking the questions that have come to be part of a familiar start-of-summer rundown: Which of my rights are still intact? What protections for the environment or a mulitracial democracy have we lost over the last few weeks? In what ways have five or six elite lawyers serving in unelected, unaccountable lifelong positions on the Supreme Court undermined my ability to control my own future or our collective ability to build a better society?

As we begin to wrap our heads around the fallout of another year at the Supreme Court, the calls for reform have grown increasingly more urgent. Advocates and legislators are pushing for ethics reform to address the justices’ self-enrichment while in positions of public trust, term limits to ensure that no individual justice can serve for decades on end regardless of how out of step their jurisprudence is with the American public, and expansion of the court to rebalance the body after years of maneuvering to pack it with loyal conservative actors.

Increasingly, these calls for reform have included criticisms of the Supreme Court’s accumulation of power into its own hands. Legal academics have drawn attention to the court’s “judicial power grab” and ways that Congress might reclaim the power it was intended to have under our system of government by and for the people. There was never supposed to be this much power concentrated in the least democratically accountable branch of government, so the argument goes, and structural reform is needed to ensure that the people, through our elected officials in Congress, have responsibility for shaping the future of the nation.

In order to understand the nuances of public opinion on the future of the judiciary, Data for Progress and People’s Parity Project conducted a late April 2023 poll looking at perceptions of the Supreme Court, gauging opinions on the balance of power between the judiciary and other political actors, and inquiring into whom voters want making the most important decisions facing the country.