Gary Rausch of College Park, Maryland, protests outside the Supreme Court after the verdict was handed down in Washington, Monday, July 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Martin)
on monday, The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that former President Donald Trump has broad immunity from prosecution for crimes he allegedly committed while in office. The majority decision drew sharp dissent from the court’s three liberal justices. “The president is now a king above the law,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, concluding that she “fears for our democracy and I oppose it.”
The decision is at sharp odds with public opinion: A poll conducted by Brightline Watch researchers earlier this year found that fewer than 30% of Americans (including roughly half of Republicans) believe the Supreme Court should grant broad immunity to Trump and future presidents. The immunity decision would add to a string of less-publicly reported opinions this term that would further paralyze the U.S. government and weaken restrictions on public corruption.
Taken together, these opinions could have ripple effects on American democracy that go far beyond their immediate impact on federal regulations or Trump’s criminal trial. At the very least, they suggest that conservative justices have forgotten a fundamental lesson learned in their first year of law school: that when citizens no longer believe they can resolve disputes through trusted institutions or rely on a rational legal system to hold officials accountable, they are much more likely to take matters into their own hands. And unlike many Supreme Court oral arguments, this isn’t merely hypothetical.
“What we find is that support for political violence is highly correlated with deep distrust in democratic institutions.”
“What we find is that support for political violence is highly correlated with deep distrust in democratic institutions,” said Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threat Studies (CPOST) at the University of Chicago.
For the past three years, CPOST has been tracking Americans’ support for political violence in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. One of its findings is that as trust in the nation’s institutions declines, as it did in the Supreme Court, acceptance of the use of force in politics rises. Since the Capitol attack, Republicans have expressed the highest levels of support for violence as a political tool, Pape says. But over the past year, CPOST has seen support among Democrats, albeit at a lower rate, increasing. “There’s no reason to think Democrats won’t be affected by this,” Pape says.
In one of the most controversial cases this term, the Supreme Court invalidated a 40-year-old precedent that allowed federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer. This cornerstone of the administrative state, known as the Chevron rule, has long been under attack from polluting corporations and other unscrupulous businesses. In another case, Justice Ketenji Brown Jackson, in dissent from a 6-3 decision, said the Court had opened the door to a “tsunami of litigation” by dramatically extending deadlines for suing federal regulatory agencies.
The January 6 rioters and former President Trump received stays of execution in court rulings. FisherThis could result in charges being dropped for attempting to block the certification of the 2020 election results.
The Supreme Court also weakened prosecutors’ ability to fight public corruption by ruling that it is OK for public officials to accept “bribes” (essentially bribes given after the fact) from those who hold favorable public positions. This is particularly ironic given the recent revelation that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas had accepted tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of lavish trips and other gifts from business associates for years before issuing their June ruling limiting the Court’s ability to prosecute bribery cases.
“There is every reason to believe that Democrats will become even more distrustful of the Supreme Court’s ability to properly serve as a guardrail for democracy,” Pape said. Fisher “The more these beliefs spread, the more likely we are to see support for the use of force as an alternative on the left,” he said.
For example, CPOST found that the number of Democrats who support using force to restore abortion rights struck down by the courts in 2022 doubled from 8% to 16% between January and June 2023. Among Democrats who are most distrustful of the current state of democracy, that number jumped to 26%.
None of these numbers are particularly surprising. Even Republicans are shocked by stories of women suffering pregnancy complications dying from hemorrhagic shock while their husbands helplessly watch while doctors and hospitals refuse to provide treatment because of state abortion bans that the courts have allowed to go ahead. The court’s decision to postpone the case challenging Idaho’s statewide abortion ban has only added to the outrage.
The Supreme Court’s decision to give the president broad immunity from criminal prosecution is sure to further stoke Democratic fears about Trump being re-elected and its impact on everything from the justice system to immigration, LGBT and other civil rights. “The more people see Trump as a danger to democracy, the more they support using force to stop him from returning to office,” Pape says the CPOST data shows.
All these issues contribute to an overall decline in Americans’ trust in the Supreme Court, which has plummeted since 2021. Polls show the Court’s approval rating is at an all-time low, but that was before the exoneration decision. A September 2023 Gallup poll found that about 60% of Americans are dissatisfied with the way the Supreme Court is running, more than double the number in 2001. An Associated Press-NORC poll at the end of June found that 7 in 10 Americans believe the Supreme Court’s decisions are based on ideology, not law. The same poll also found that about 60% of Democrats have completely lost trust in the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court’s recent ideological and anti-democratic decisions could broadly undermine public confidence in American institutions, especially given the turmoil of the current presidential election. The start of a civil war: how to stop itwrites that countries fall into dictatorship not because their leaders are weak or unperforming, but because leaders “begin to ignore the guardrails that protect our democracy.” Among the guardrails she lists are limits on presidential power, which is the exact opposite of what the Supreme Court has done this term. “Nations on this brink, like the United States recently,” she writes, “can see a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures further weakening institutions and easily pushing them toward conflict.”
Amanda Ripley, author High Conflict: Why We Fall Into It and How to Get Outhas spent the past six years studying the roots of political violence. She recently told me that the real danger of an erosion of trust in democratic institutions like the Supreme Court is that “once the violence starts, it’s very hard to stop it. And now that we’ve weakened our institutions, people no longer trust them to do the right thing.”
Pape says none of the data he collects means violence is inevitable. “Political violence is like a forest fire,” he explains. “It requires a flammable substance (dry wood) and a trigger, like a lightning strike or a cigar butt. With political violence, we can measure the amount of flammable substance, but we can’t predict the political trigger for that flammable substance.” The trigger depends heavily on the actions of political leaders, he says. “Leaders can either be the trigger or they can suppress it.”
Pape worries that all the combustible material recently presented by the Supreme Court and other political actors creates a situation that is so dangerous for the election that the potential for violence is likely to escalate thereafter. “We’re on a collision course after November 5th,” he worries. “I’m not saying that political violence is a certainty, but what we’ve seen over the past week are factors that are going to put us increasingly on that collision course.”
