The Supreme Court was designed to be the least dangerous branch. Alexander Hamilton called it that in Federalist 78, and for most of American history the description held: the Court had no army, no purse, and no way to enforce its own decrees. Its only real power was the willingness of the country to obey it. That willingness is now in question, and the numbers are not subtle.

In July 2026, Gallup measured Supreme Court job approval at 33 percent, the lowest in the 26-year history of the trend, with disapproval at a record 61 percent (Jones, 2026). The Marquette Law School Poll, which tracks the Court continuously, found 47 percent approval and 53 percent disapproval in late July, below 50 percent for the ninth consecutive survey (Franklin, 2026). The same poll found that 58 percent of Americans now believe the justices are motivated mainly by politics rather than law, up six points in a single quarter (Franklin, 2026). A majority, 54 percent, say the Court is going out of its way to avoid ruling against President Trump (Franklin, 2026).

This is not a partisan complaint. It is a structural diagnosis. The Court has not merely made unpopular decisions; it has accumulated power, shed accountability, and allowed its confirmation process to become an exercise in raw partisan power. The decline is real, the causes are identifiable, and the restoration is possible. This essay assigns blame plainly, because the situation deserves it, and then lays out the reforms that could actually work.

What the Court Did to Earn the Numbers

The 2025-2026 term gave both parties reasons to distrust the institution, which is precisely what makes the polling so damning. The Court expanded the president’s power to fire the heads of independent agencies, upheld state laws limiting transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ teams, and allowed states to count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but arriving afterward (Jones, 2026). It also rejected the president’s legal basis for imposing tariffs without congressional authorization, struck down his executive order limiting birthright citizenship, and rejected, on due process grounds, his attempt to immediately remove Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook (Jones, 2026).

The public’s reaction to individual rulings is not the problem. Marquette found that a majority of Americans favor the Court’s decisions in 11 of the 13 cases it tested, including 81 percent support for limiting police access to cell phone location data and 66 percent support for the tariff ruling (Franklin, 2026). Americans are not angry at the Court for being conservative or liberal. They are angry at the Court for being a political actor, and the evidence for that perception is not confined to the left. Republican approval collapsed from 79 percent in September 2025 to 58 percent in July 2026, the steepest single-year drop in the Gallup trend, driven by rulings that thwarted Trump administration priorities (Jones, 2026). When both parties lose faith in the same institution, the institution has a problem that no single appointment can fix.

The Ethics Code That Enforces Nothing

The most corrosive development has been the ethics record, not because every allegation is proven, but because the institution’s response has been to police itself with a document that has no teeth.

In November 2023, after a year of investigative reporting on undisclosed gifts and travel, the justices adopted a Code of Conduct for the first time in the Court’s history (Supreme Court of the United States, 2023). The code is real. It binds the justices to avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety, to disqualify themselves where impartiality might reasonably be questioned, and to refrain from political activity. What it does not do is enforce any of that. There is no complaints process, no investigating body, no sanction, and no mechanism by which anyone, including a party to a case, can challenge a justice’s decision to sit. Every other federal judge in the country is subject to a disciplinary system run by the Judicial Conference. The nine justices are subject to themselves.

The consequences have been predictable. In May 2026, a coalition of watchdog groups asked the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate whether Justice Samuel Alito violated the code by participating in cases involving oil companies while holding fossil fuel investments; a review of his financial disclosures found he gained up to $2.9 million from fossil fuel assets between 2005 and 2024 (Mother Jones, 2026). Alito recused himself from one environmental case only after discovering the conflict days before oral arguments, and the Court responded by building an automated recusal-check system, an admission that the old system had failed (Courthouse News Service, 2026). Justice Clarence Thomas has never been subject to any finding about the undisclosed luxury travel, private school tuition, and real estate transactions documented by ProPublica beginning in 2023, because there is no forum in which such a finding could be made (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023).

The code was a public relations response to a legitimacy crisis, and it has not worked. The public knows the difference between a rule and an enforcement mechanism. A code of conduct that no one can invoke is a press release.

The Structural Rot: Tenure, Timing, and Confirmation Wars

The ethics problem is the visible symptom. The underlying disease is structural, and it has three parts.

Lifetime tenure has become generational power. For the first 180 years of American history, justices served an average of about 15 years. Since the 1970s, the average has ballooned to 26 years, equivalent to six and a half presidential terms, and justices appointed in their early fifties, which includes a supermajority of the current bench, can serve 35 years (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023). A single justice can now shape the law for generations without any electoral check, and can, in effect, choose the ideology of their replacement by timing their retirement. The United States is one of only five countries in the world with life tenure for its highest court, and the only major democracy that does not limit the terms of its constitutional judges (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023). Every other country that has written a constitution since 1787 looked at life tenure and declined to copy it.

Strategic retirements have become the norm. The last time a justice retired knowing the vacancy would likely be filled by a president of the opposing party was more than thirty years ago, when Thurgood Marshall stepped down in declining health (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023). Since then, retirements have been timed to lock in ideological control. Justice Anthony Kennedy reportedly lobbied President Trump to include Brett Kavanaugh on his list of potential nominees before announcing his own retirement (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023). This is not a bug in the system. It is the system, and it converts the Court into a prize to be captured rather than an institution to be served.

The confirmation process has been reduced to raw power. The Senate’s refusal to consider Merrick Garland in 2016, holding the seat open for more than a year until a Republican president could fill it, broke a norm of more than a century. Four years later, the same party rushed Amy Coney Barrett through a confirmation hearing while early voting was already under way in the 2020 election (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023). The asymmetry is the point: the rules are whatever the majority can enforce. Chief Justice Roberts is the only sitting justice confirmed with the support of a majority of senators from the opposing party (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023). Every other current justice was confirmed on a near party-line vote, which means the Court’s membership is now understood, correctly, as a function of which party held the Senate when vacancies opened.

The result is a Court whose composition is a partisan artifact. Republicans have won four of the last nine presidential terms and the popular vote twice, yet have appointed six of the nine sitting justices (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023). That disparity is not the product of any conspiracy; it is the product of tenure, timing, and the Garland precedent. It is also why the Court’s legitimacy is now a partisan question, and why every major ruling is read through the lens of who appointed the majority.

The Reforms That Could Actually Work

Restoration is possible, and it does not require court packing, which would be a constitutional arms race with no endpoint. The serious reform agenda has three parts, and each is supported by mainstream legal scholarship and, in the case of term limits, by supermajorities of the public.

Term limits and regularized appointments. The Supreme Court Biennial Appointments and Term Limits Act, reintroduced in July 2026 by Senators Whitehouse, Booker, Blumenthal, and Padilla, would establish 18-year terms for future justices, with a new justice taking the bench every two years (Whitehouse, 2026). Under the bill, the nine most junior justices would hear the Court’s appellate docket, while justices whose terms had ended would move to senior status, hearing original jurisdiction cases and stepping in when a sitting justice recuses (Whitehouse, 2026). The bill is grounded in Congress’s constitutional authority over the Court’s appellate jurisdiction, the same authority the Court itself has long recognized, and it would take effect at the start of the first new presidential term after enactment, so no sitting justice would be removed (Whitehouse, 2026).

The effect would be transformative. Every president would get two appointments per term, no more and no less. Vacancies would arrive on a schedule, eliminating both the incentive for strategic retirement and the destabilizing scramble of late-term deaths. The stakes of each confirmation would fall, because no single appointment would reshape the Court for a generation. And the Court would begin to reflect the country that elects the presidents who staff it. Polling has shown more than two-thirds of Americans support term limits, including majorities of both parties, and both conservative and progressive scholars convened by the National Constitution Center independently proposed 18-year terms in their model constitutions (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023).

An enforceable ethics code. The second reform is to give the code of conduct actual teeth. The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, which Whitehouse and colleagues have reintroduced in successive Congresses, would require the justices to adopt a binding code, create a mechanism to investigate alleged violations, and strengthen disclosure requirements (Whitehouse, 2026). The details matter less than the principle: there must be a forum in which a credible allegation against a justice can be investigated by someone other than the justice. Every other federal judge has one. The Court’s insistence that it alone can police itself is the single most damaging position it has taken, because it tells the public that the justices consider themselves above the standards they apply to everyone else.

Transparency and recusal reform. The third reform is procedural. The Court should adopt the automated recusal checks it has already begun building, publish the reasons for recusals, and end the practice of justices deciding, alone and without explanation, whether their own conflicts require them to stand aside. The Court’s own commentary concedes that individual justices decide recusal issues themselves, with no review (Supreme Court of the United States, 2023). That is not a system. It is a honor system, and the honor system has failed.

The Honest Objections

The objections to these reforms deserve a straight answer.

“Term limits require a constitutional amendment.” The leading constitutional scholars who have studied this, including the members of President Biden’s bipartisan Commission on the Supreme Court, concluded that 18-year terms with senior status can be achieved by statute, because Congress’s power over the Court’s appellate jurisdiction is plenary (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023). The Constitution requires that justices hold their offices during good behavior; it does not require that they hear appellate cases forever. Senior status is not a removal. It is a reassignment, and it is the same mechanism that has applied to federal judges for more than a century.

“This is court packing by another name.” It is not. Court packing changes the number of seats to advantage one side. Term limits change the schedule on which seats turn over, and they apply identically to both parties. The reform’s whole point is to end the arms race, not to win it. The objection proves the problem: the current system is so rigged by timing that a proposal to make timing fair is attacked as a power grab.

“The Court is fine; the public is just polarized.” The polling contradicts this. Republican approval fell 21 points in ten months, which is not polarization, it is disappointment. The Court’s own rulings, which the public largely supports on the merits, are not the problem. The problem is the perception, shared across parties, that the Court is a political institution. That perception is rational, because the Court’s composition is now a function of partisan timing, and its ethics are self-policed. You cannot fix a rational perception with better messaging. You fix it with structure.

Blame, Plainly

Here is the assignment, without hedging.

The primary blame belongs to the political actors who broke the confirmation process. The Senate majority that refused Merrick Garland a hearing in 2016, and the same majority that rushed Amy Coney Barrett through in 2020, converted advice and consent into raw power. They are the authors of the current Court’s composition, and they are the reason every future confirmation will be a war. The blame is not evenly shared. One party broke the norm, and the other party has been responding to the break ever since.

A specific share belongs to the justices themselves. The Court adopted a code of conduct only after a year of damaging reporting, and it built the code without any enforcement mechanism. Individual justices have declined to recuse themselves from cases where their financial interests or family entanglements would have disqualified any other federal judge. The Court’s institutional instinct, to protect itself rather than to reform itself, has done more damage to its legitimacy than any single ruling.

A share belongs to the system of lifetime tenure itself. The Framers adopted life tenure when people did not live as long as they do now, as Chief Justice Roberts himself acknowledged while working as a White House attorney in the 1980s (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023). The system has outlived its design. It creates the incentive for strategic retirement, it makes every vacancy a generational prize, and it guarantees that the Court will lag the country by decades. No one designed the current dysfunction. It is the accumulated product of a design that no longer fits the lives it governs.

The Verdict

The Supreme Court is not beyond repair. It has been through legitimacy crises before, and it has survived them, because the country ultimately chose to obey it. The Court that struck down the New Deal and then reversed itself under pressure, the Court that decided Dred Scott and was answered by a war and three constitutional amendments, the Court that resisted desegregation and was answered by the civil rights movement, all of them were eventually brought back into alignment with the country. The mechanism of that alignment was always the same: the people, acting through the political branches, insisting that the Court answer to the Constitution rather than to itself.

That mechanism is now broken, because the political branches have stopped doing their job. Congress has not passed a Supreme Court reform bill in decades, and it has allowed the confirmation process to become a partisan weapon. The public, for its part, has been told for years that the Court is above politics, and it has stopped believing it. The Marquette poll found that 69 percent of Americans say Congress has given up too much power to the president and the executive branch, and 58 percent believe Congress can take some of it back (Franklin, 2026). The same logic applies to the Court. Congress can act. It has the authority. What it lacks is the will.

The reforms are not radical. Eighteen-year terms, an enforceable ethics code, and transparent recusal are the standards of every other court in the country and every other democracy in the world. They are the ordinary furniture of functioning judiciaries. The United States is the outlier, and the outlier is paying the price in legitimacy.

The Court’s only real power is the willingness of the country to obey it. That willingness is a renewable resource, but it is not infinite. Every term that passes without structural reform, every ethics scandal that goes uninvestigated, every confirmation that is decided by raw power, spends a little more of it. The country can restore the Court, but only by treating it as what it is: a branch of government that must be accountable to the people it serves, like every other branch, and not as a priesthood that polices itself.

The Court that lost its balance can find it again. The question is whether the people who are supposed to hold it accountable will do their part. The Constitution gave them the tools. The only question is whether they will use them.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman

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