Chief Justice Roberts receives highest approval rating among federal leaders: poll

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts received the highest approval rating among leaders from across the three branches of federal government, according to a new poll in which Roberts was the only official to gain majority support from both Democrats and Republicans.

Roberts, widely seen as an incrementalist and institutionalist, earned 60 percent approval in the Gallup poll released on Monday. That included approval from 55 percent of Democrats, 57 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of independents.

The chief justice received the highest rating among the 11 federal leaders included in the poll, placing him just ahead of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell (53 percent) and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Anthony Fauci (52 percent). The lowest rated official was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), at just 34 percent approval. President Biden ranked near the bottom with 43 percent support.

The poll was conducted over the first half of December, nearly a third of the way through one of the Supreme Court’s most highly charged terms in recent memory, with a docket that includes major disputes over abortion, guns and church-state separation. 

The first two weeks of December saw the 6-3 conservative majority court confront two high-profile abortion cases, where Roberts’s instincts for incrementalism and institutional stability were on display. 

During oral argument on Dec. 1 over a Mississippi 15-week abortion ban, Roberts seemed to signal an interest in upholding the Mississippi law without overturning the court’s landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. His intermediate approach appeared to fall flat with the five conservative justices to his right, however, who seemed poised to overrule Roe, which bars states from banning abortion prior to fetal viability, around 23 weeks of pregnancy. 

In a separate abortion case in December, this one involving Texas’s six-week ban, S.B. 8, the chief justice upbraided the court’s more conservative members for allowing the restriction to stand while a court challenge proceeds.

Roberts, writing in a partial dissent that was joined by the court’s three liberals, accused his fellow conservative justices of undermining the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. 

“The clear purpose and actual effect of S.B. 8 has been to nullify this Court’s rulings. It is, however, a basic principle that the Constitution is the ‘fundamental and paramount law of the nation,’ and ‘it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,’ ” Roberts wrote, citing the landmark 1803 ruling in Marbury v. Madison, which established the court’s role as the interpreter of the Constitution.

“Indeed, ‘if the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery,’ ” he continued. 

Polling from earlier this year suggests Roberts’s concerns about the court’s public perception are well-founded. A Gallup poll in September found the Supreme Court’s job approval had sunk to 40 percent, its lowest level since the polling firm began asking the question in 2000.