There’s a big difference between an unpopular decision and a decision that delegitimizes the court.
A February 2010 Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 65 percent of the public “strongly opposed” the court’s 5 to 4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which overturned an act of Congress limiting corporate and union campaign contributions. This is one reason President Obama and other Democrats felt free to criticize the court’s finding.
Yet Citizens United did no apparent damage to public confidence in the Supreme Court. A 2011 survey funded by Washington University in St. Louis found that 22.3 percent of the public still had a “great deal” of confidence in the court — double the rate for the Congress whose law the court had just struck down. Only 7.1 percent expressed “hardly any” confidence in the justices, in contrast to 29.7 percent and 29 percent who felt that way about Congress and President Obama, respectively.
As Washington University political science professor James L. Gibson writes, public confidence in the court is “obdurate.” Decades worth of data show that it does not ebb and flow with the short-term popularity of its decisions, much less with the size of a court majority.