The SCOTUS has been delivering what some people call regressive rulings. News outlets have been producing articles concerning a resulting decline in public opinion of the SCOTUS. I do not want to discuss the rulings themselves, except inasmuch as doing so answers the question: So what?
Honestly, so what? The members of the SCOTUS are not elected, and they serve until they die or retire, are impeached and removed. They answer to no one (as we are seeing with Thomas). They don’t even need any particularly hard to find qualifications apart from a president dropping their name, and a senate being willing to say, “Yeah, okay.” So, if a handful of dedicated partisans find their way to the bench and start making all sorts of oppressive rulings outside the interest and desire of say, 80% of Americans…so what?
And this is exactly the problem. They aren’t elected. They answer to no one. Yet they are in the position of shaping broad public policy for the entire nation – including when they abuse their power, as they are doing now.
As @Czarcasm points out, the problem is not one of popularity.
Unpopular, distrusted, not seen by the masses as a valid source of jurisprudence … so what? What does my opinion of the individuals, or of the institution itself, matter? The existence of the court is part of The Constitution, and the only way around that is to toss the old paper and come up with something new. Sure, THAT’S possible, but I wouldn’t consider that to be likely.
Technically, the Supreme Court has no power to enforce its rulings; the rulings only happen as a result of the federal/state governments’ tacit agreement to abide by them. So…if the trust is gone…
Once SCOTUS goes too far in handing down judgements too many voters are unhappy with, the voters will elect leaders to appoint justices with the other viewpoint. They’ll eventually go too far in the other direction and hand down judgements that alienate other voters.
This overcorrection can (and IMHO currently does) result in decisions that overrule earlier decisions, which later on are overruled by other decisions. Havving SCOTUS tell America to change direction every 20 years or so isn’t a good thing.
I think the OP is asking “since they are not beholden to us, why would our distrust, mistrust, or negative opinion matter?”
Ultimately, it’s question of power. Is our collective power enough to matter against these nine (well, six)? The answer is yes, but it would take a concert grassroots effort that we’re unwilling to make.
For Roe v Wade, for example, we could push Congress to open up the Constitution and amend the thing to make abortion rights available for all. But we haven’t, collectively, put enough pressure on the people that have the power to overrule the Court by amending the fundamental law of the land.
If SCOTUS makes themselves unpopular with rulings which call into question their own dedication to the rule of law, it very quickly corrodes society’s own dedication to the rule of law.
Once most of the citizens (and especially the rich ones and the politicians) decide that all law is corrupt law only to be obeyed when it’s convenient, pretty quickly your society turns into something between the Philippines, Syria, and Somalia. Impunity rules everywhere a policeman isn’t standing, and where they are standing, their version of impunity rules instead.
That’s why it matters. Because the rest of us don’t want to live in a place like the Philippines, Syria, and Somalia.
Our feelings about issues have absolutely nothing to do with constitutionality. As long as people feel they are operating in good faith their popularity should not matter much. Politicians and the media are the ones destroying confidence in the court.
Because when government institutions are not respected, and seen as not acting in the interest of the citizens, the government loses legitimacy. When citizens stop seeing the government is legitimate, it tears at social fabric. People stop acting in way as that support the public good; corruption rises, politics becomes a zero sum game. The whole thing collapses.
There is a real cost to government institutions losing public trust. People elect increasingly unqualified candidates because they don’t value competence in government; they embrace wild conspiracy theories that lead to calamity (like thinking horse medicine will help with Covid); and insisting on simple problems to complex problems.
If disapproval of the court was really 80 percent, and the disapproval was almost all from progressives and centrists, and it would result in some action being taken, maybe an increase in the size of the court. Note that to get to 80 percent, it implies a historic decline in the GOP, so the Democrats would have the votes.
But public views are now roughly split.
What if the current justices made a big ruling resulting in a convicted Donald Trump being imprisoned? Then maybe you’d get to that 80 percent, with conservatives as disgusted with the court as progressives. I’m guessing nothing much would happen because of complete disagreement on the remedy.
If the court ruled as progressives wished on gay rights, guns, abortion, and AA, it might be equally unpopular — just with different people. The reason the supremes are at roughly 50 percent approval is that the country is divided on widely cared-about issues coming before the court.
Which comes because there has been a decades long effort by the GOP to delegitimize government. And it worked spectacularly. It’s why we are collapsing.
The replies so far have centered around answering the question “why is it bad if the Supreme Court is unpopular, distrusted and/or not seen as valid?” That’s a good discussion.
But I took the OP to mean “why should it matter to the individual justices (if the above is true)?” If the six majority justices are happy with the direction in which the country is heading, is there any personal price any of them are likely to pay for pushing it in that direction? Any justice can be impeached and removed for cause, but it would take a far more unified political will than now exists in the country for that to happen. A president with strong majorities and with sufficient provocation could stack the court, thereby reducing the individual power of existing justices, but anyone with sense knows that’s a sucker’s game. There could, I suppose, be a “storm the Bastille” moment at the Supreme Court, but I really don’t see that happening either. So no, I can’t think of any reason why those justices have anything to fear.