Apr 18, 2012

The Invisible Supreme Court

The Roberts Court
You might assume that American citizens know something about the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), considering the recent coverage of the hearings on the Affordable Care Act and Citizens United decision. Well, you'd be wrong.


Based on a Pew Center Research survey, when asked who is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, less than 30% of those asked knew the answer. Here's a chart of the survey answers:


Thurgood Marshall, a former Supreme Court Justice, died in 1993.  John Paul Stevens is also a former Supreme Court Justice.  Harry Reid is the senior Senator from Nevada.

What the chart proves is that analysis about what the Court does — whether it’s what they have already done on Citizens United or what they might do with the Affordable Care Act — will impact the political landscape amounts to something close to a guessing game.

Regular people are simply not engaged — they don’t know or care — about the intricacies of the government in a way that people who live inside the Beltway and spend their lives in politics are.

It's interesting to note that many Americans have a more negative opinion of the Court after Citizen's United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that allows corporations and individuals to spend as much money as they want on political advertising as long as it is not coordinated with candidate campaigns.

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