The US Supreme Court’s decisions during President Trump’s second term have come under scrutiny after findings from a new Gallup study flagged a record decline in trust in the country’s highest court.
Event Context
Amid that, a legal analysis by CNN has shed light on Chief Justice Roberts’ ‘mixed’ approach to Trump’s agenda, leading many to wonder if the former might have paved the way for the latter. But it has put the SCOTUS and the Chief Justice under lot of scrutiny.
Team Analysis
Biskupic puts two Supreme Court opinions this year by Roberts side-by-side: the first on the decision to give the Trump power to fire independent regulators; the second, the removal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.
“Breaking from usual court procedures, the two opinions, one giving Trump a win, one a loss, were published simultaneously on the court’s website,” Biskupic writes. The two opinions, one a win for Trump and the other a loss, came out at the same time, allowing the SCOTUS to avoid criticism about being pro-Trump while, simultaneously, handing out unprecedented power to the President.
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Among such critical decisions, Biskupic lists the decision to give Trump partial immunity from criminal prosecution, curtailing of lower court’s power to issue injunctions against Trump’s policies, and the limited entry of foreignersin the Trump vs Hawaii case in Trump’s first term. Justice Roberts had a significant role to play in the decisions.
“Roberts has attempted to stress that the Supreme is empowering the presidency, not this particular president and has tried to counter any narrative that the bench is under the sway of Trump,” Biskupic writes. Her analysis adds to several analyses already done by the likes of The Guardian, Reuters and most recently an article on SCOTUS Blog, that alleges that Chief Justice Roberts could be pro-Trump.
However, officially, Supreme Court Justices cannot have political affiliation. They can either be conservative or liberal.
Match Outlook
The analysis by CNN’s legal expert and Chief Supreme Court Analyst Joan Bisupic came in the backdrop of the Gallup findings, released on Monday. The Gallup study found that only 33% of Americans thought that the Supreme Court is doing a “good job.” But what could be even more worrying for Trump is that there has been a steady decline in support for the SCOTUS among Republicans.
The unprecedented 33% trust in SCOTUS recorded in the poll is a 6% drop from last year, when the same poll found the Supreme Court had the approval of 39% of Americans.
Simultaneously, it also raises the question that if such a sharp decline in the approval of the SCOTUS in the last year came amid so many significant decisions, including the birthright citizenship verdict, it raises the question: where does it put the Supreme Court’s conservative majority led by Chief Justice John Roberts?
The idea is further reinforced with the Gallup poll findings that shows that the SCOTUS’s decisions have been perceived negatively by most Americans.
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Joan Biskupic states that the Supreme Court has given a series of mixed decisions in the last year – and more broadly in Trump’s second term- some of which have gone in favor of the POTUS, some haven’t. However, she argues that many decisions and opinions by Justice Roberts enabled the Trump administration in ways that contributed to the overall decline in approval for SCOTUS.
