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Whaddya Know? A Majority Of Americans Support Expanding The Supreme Court

The current Supreme Court system isn't working...

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Activists For Expanding The Supreme Court Rally Outside The Court Building

(Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Demand Justice)

Well, this has got to be a fly in John Roberts’s “I swear the Supreme Court is legitimate” tour: Marquette Law School just published the results of its latest survey on the Supreme Court and fans of the Court won’t be happy.

First of all, overall approval isn’t great — 40 percent of respondents approve of the Court. But, in a post-Roe world, SCOTUS’s tanking polling is nearly a given. What truly stood out is that a majority of Americans — barely at 51 percent, but count it nevertheless — now support expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court.

I’ll tell you, in history class when we learned about the New Deal and how FDR tussled with the Supreme Court over the expansion of executive power, I never thought Court packing would come back. …Then again, I never thought one party would callously leave a Supreme Court seat open for over a year in an openly political move to steal a place on the Court. Mostly people also probably didn’t expect the vitriolic — and poorly reasoned — decision in Dobbs that stripped millions of people of rights and launched us into a dystopian reality of ever worse stories of women who can’t receive abortion care in their home state. Time makes fools of us all.

Faced with lifetime appointments of jurists who seem way more interested in political victories than in rights and the law, well, diluting the power of each individual justice just may be the fastest way to rebalance the Court. And it looks like most Americans agree.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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