Supreme Court Approval Hit a Record Low. Term Limits Now Poll at 78% Support.

Public confidence in the Court has dropped sharply, alongside a distinct, separate reform debate

Public approval of the Supreme Court has declined substantially in recent years. A September 2025 Pew Research poll found just 48% of Americans view the Court favorably, down from 70% five years earlier. Gallup's own tracking, which began in 2000, found approval hit 39% in a separate recent measurement, its lowest point since Gallup started asking the question, a decline widely linked to the contentious Amy Coney Barrett confirmation following Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death, and a subsequent series of ethics controversies involving individual justices.

Separately, and notably for the first time, the Court decided more substantive cases through its "shadow docket", emergency orders issued without full briefing or oral argument, than through its traditional merits docket in the 2024-2025 term, according to Brennan Center analysis, a procedural shift that reform advocates argue has reduced transparency around major decisions.

Term limits specifically enjoy genuinely rare, consistent bipartisan support across many separate polls

Multiple independent polls, conducted by different organizations using different methodologies, converge on remarkably similar findings. A September 2025 Annenberg Public Policy Center poll found 69% support for replacing lifetime tenure with a fixed number of years. A Fox News poll found 78% support, up from 66% in 2022. A February 2026 Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll found two-thirds support with majorities across all three party groups: 78% of Democrats, 61% of independents, and 56% of Republicans specifically.

Navigator Research's May 2026 survey found even more granular bipartisan detail: 74% overall support for term limits, breaking down to +70 net support among Democrats, +53 among independents, +61 among non-MAGA-aligned Republicans, and +40 even among MAGA-aligned Republicans specifically, genuinely positive net support across every measured subgroup.

The most commonly proposed structure, and why advocates say it changes confirmation politics

• The most widely discussed specific proposal would establish 18-year staggered terms with regularized appointments, meaning every president would get a predictable number of appointments each term rather than confirmations depending entirely on the unpredictable timing of a justice's death or voluntary retirement
• Advocates, including former Brennan Center president Michael Waldman, who served on President Biden's 2021 Supreme Court reform commission, argue this would reduce the intensely high stakes currently attached to each individual confirmation fight, since no single nomination would represent a multi-decade, potentially generation-defining outcome
• Democratic Representative Ro Khanna and Representative John Olszewski have introduced separate proposals in the current Congress, including a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment establishing 18-year terms specifically
• These Democratic-led efforts are widely characterized in political coverage as long-shot proposals given they would require either a constitutional amendment (a high bar) or, for a statutory approach, control of both chambers of Congress plus overcoming likely court challenges to a law's constitutionality absent a formal amendment

An enforceable ethics code draws even broader support than term limits, and doesn't require a constitutional amendment

Court ethics reform consistently polls as separately, and sometimes even more, popular than term limits specifically: multiple surveys find 70-77% support for a binding, independently enforceable ethics code, notably higher than support for expanding the Court's size (just 40% support in Fix the Court's most recent tracking, the most partisan and divisive of the major reform proposals tested). The Supreme Court itself adopted a new ethics code in late 2023, but reform advocates, including sitting Justice Elena Kagan, who has publicly said an independent enforcement mechanism would be "a good idea," have specifically criticized it for lacking any enforcement mechanism beyond justices evaluating their own potential violations.

The core disagreement

Reform advocates argue the combination of declining public trust, ethics controversies, and the outsized stakes of lifetime appointments justify structural change, and point to the genuinely rare cross-partisan polling agreement as evidence this isn't simply a partisan grievance but a broadly shared concern about institutional design. Reform skeptics generally argue lifetime tenure was deliberately designed by the founders specifically to insulate justices from short-term political pressure, and that term limits or ethics enforcement mechanisms controlled by other branches could compromise judicial independence in ways that ultimately cause more harm than the problems they're meant to solve. Both sides broadly acknowledge that term limits and a binding ethics code, as opposed to Court-expansion ("court-packing"), are the two reform ideas that have actually achieved durable bipartisan public support, even though achieving either one still faces the same fundamental structural hurdle: getting Congress to actually act.