The country’s most famous constitutional law professor may have blundered when he started picking on the Supreme Court. In the wake of President Obama’s unprecedented attack on the Court’s role in reviewing legislation, Rasmussen Reports has some interesting figures:
Just before the highly publicized hearing on the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law, ratings for the U.S. Supreme Court had fallen to the lowest level ever measured by Rasmussen Reports. Now, following the hearings, approval of the court is way up.
Forty-one percent (41%) of Likely U.S. Voters now rate the Supreme Court’s performance as good or excellent, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. That’s up 13 points from 28% in mid-March and is the court’s highest ratings in two-and-a-half years.
As a conservative, I can truly say that there are Supreme Court decisions that I really, really don’t like. Most of us on this side of the aisle have been complaining about the Court for years. What the president did, however, was something very different: he attacked the very legitimacy of the court's role in reviewing laws passed by Congress, one of its chief reasons for existing.
I’d like to believe that two factors are at work in the Court’s recent upswing in popularity: those polled were impressed by the quality of the questions posed by justices in oral arguments over Obamacare, and, in addition to that, the respondents feared that the president was trying to bully the Court. Perhaps the Court's new popularity is the result of Americans wanting to show that we understand that the Supreme Court is a bedrock institution in our republic.
Hat tip to the Weekly Standard for spotting this.