POLLS ON POLLS ON POLLS | Americans Support Term Limits On Justices | The SCOTUS Popularity Contest
July 18, 2018
POLL DU JOUR
|If you haven’t noticed, the whole country seems to be fixated on the Supreme Court nomination of JUDGE BRETT KAVANAUGH. And with good reason — this SCOTUS fight feels a bit different. A new poll from Gallup has the numbers to confirm such a difference. Released yesterday, the poll found that Americans are more divided over this Supreme Court pick than any other since 1987. The readout shows 41 percent of Americans want to see Kavanaugh confirmed to the bench, while 37 percent of respondents want the Senate to reject his nomination. The four-point advantage for Kavanaugh is the lowest for any of the last 10 nominees recorded by Gallup.
DOUBLE TROUBLE
|The Pew Research Center also looked into how Americans are reacting to the JUDGE KAVANAUGH’S nomination, and their numbers also confirm the partisan divide is the widest it’s been in recent history. Lorraine Woellert with POLITICO reports on the survey.
TOP-ED
|In the Los Angeles Times, James Lindgren and Ross M. Stolzenberg argue term limits on Supreme Court justices could fix the broken, political process of confirmations. They suggest term limits of 18 or 24 years and say such a strategy could help limit or even erase partisan advantage over who serves on the high court. “Adding court term limits to the Constitution stands a better chance than some might think. A constitutional amendment requires ratification by three-quarters of the states, and judicial term limits are well established in the states. Term limits or maximum judicial ages are used by 49 of 50 state supreme courts, as well as the high courts of other highly developed countries.”
GET IT TOGETHER
|Terms limits on justices aren’t a wild card issue anymore according to the latest Morning Consult/POLITICO poll which found a majority of voters support term limits. Eli Yokley with Morning Consult writes, “Sixty-one percent of voters support term limits for Supreme Court justices, including two-thirds of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans. Twenty percent overall oppose such limits, according to the survey of 1,991 registered voters.” GABE ROTH, Executive Director of Fix the Court, was also interviewed for the story and remarked, “It’s important to have justices who are reflective of the population they’re bringing judgment upon. Before Kennedy retired, we still had justices who were appointed during the Reagan administration. A lot’s changed in the world since the Reagan administration.”
SPEAKING OF FIXING THE COURT
|Stephanie Mencimer with Mother Jones reports on Fix the Court’s year-long effort to to make all of BRETT KAVANAUGH’S federal records available to the public. “Expecting that Kavanaugh might eventually end up as a Supreme Court nominee, Fix the Court submitted records requests last year to the Department of Justice, Bush’s presidential library, and the National Archives and Records Administration, and has already filed lawsuits against DOJ and the archives to speed up those requests.”
HOW RIGHT YOU ARE
|Just how conservative is BRETT KAVANAUGH? Oliver Roeder and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux with FiveThirtyEight tackle this question in their latest, digging into various methods for predicting what the nominee’s ideology could evolve into if he makes it onto the Supreme Court.
POPULAR, I KNOW ABOUT POPULAR
|Neil A. Lewis writes in POLITICO Magazine about how the Supreme Court popularity contest got out of control, becoming less about the quality of nominees as jurists and more about the quality of them as mere men and (only sometimes) women.
MY NAME IS ALEXANDER HAMILTON AND THERE'S A MILLION THINGS I HAVEN'T DONE
|“For a brief moment in 1795, George Washington’s attorney general floated an idea that didn’t have a chance of success but surely would have been interesting: Alexander Hamilton as a Supreme Court justice.” Scott Bomboy with Constitution Daily takes a look back at a historical footnote on SCOTUS that most might not know about.
HENNY CAN YOU BELIEVE
|“In this time of declining civility, Twitter trolls, shattered norms and batty, bloviating cable TV talking heads on both sides, let us pause for a moment to consider a story about how rearranging furniture can make the world a more cordial, neighborly place.” Anyone who has watched Queer Eye knows the power of redecoration — but who knew such a power could extend to the marble halls of 1 First. In The Washington Post, Michael S. Rosenwald tells the story of the Supreme Court’s “Extreme Court Makeover.”