Most Democrats Want to Abolish Supreme Court or Involve UN: Poll

The Supreme Court building in Washington on June 21, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

A majority of Democrats want to abolish the Supreme Court, according to a new survey.

A total of 53 percent of Democratic respondents to a Rasmussen Reports poll said they would favor legislation that would terminate the court and replace it with “a new, democratically elected” court “with justices chosen by the American people.”

Majorities of independents and Republicans opposed the idea.

Democrats also were more likely to say they have an unfavorable opinion of the Supreme Court, and a majority agreed with the statements that the court “is a fundamentally racist institution” and “is a fundamentally sexist institution that favors men over women.”

A majority of Democrats said they supported expanding the size of the Supreme Court to 13 members from the current nine, which would enable President Joe Biden, a Democrat, to choose four justices and turn what’s now a court featuring six Republican-appointed justices and three Democratic-appointed justices into one with a majority of justices picked by Democrats.

A number of Democratic lawmakers have voiced support for expanding the court, particularly since former President Donald Trump was able to choose three justices during his four years in office.

Democratic respondents also were more in favor of a constitutional amendment that would enable the United Nations to reverse Supreme Court decisions that U.N. members “believe violate human rights.”

A total of 39 percent of Democrats supported the amendment proposal, compared with 30 percent of independents and 17 percent of Republicans.

Majorities of all three groups opposed the proposal. Some voters said they weren’t sure about all of the questions.

The national survey was conducted on July 6 and July 7 by Rasmussen Reports and the Heartland Institute. Out of 1,025 likely U.S. voters, 35 percent were Democrats, 33 percent were Republicans, and 32 percent were other. Nearly half of the respondents were between the ages of 40 and 64, with a nearly even split between men and women.

The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The survey was conducted shortly after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision by the same court that declared access to abortion to be a constitutional right, even though abortion isn’t mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.

Justice Samuel Alito, a George W. Bush appointee who wrote the majority decision, said the earlier decision was “egregiously wrong and on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided.”

After the ruling, the U.N.’s Working Group on discrimination against women and girls and two special rapporteurs claimed the ruling lacked “sound legal reasoning,” and decried the development as “a serious regression of an existing right that will jeopardize women’s health and lives.”