Nearly half of Americans say they believe the Supreme Court is ruling on President Trump's policies based on ideology instead of the law, according to a new poll.
The Washington Post/Ipsos survey, conducted July 8-13, found that 46 percent of 2,648 respondents said they believe the nine justices are ruling on cases impacting the president's agenda based on ideology.
A quarter of respondents said the high court is ruling on those cases based on the law, while 28 percent had no opinion and 1 percent skipped the question.
The Supreme Court has given Trump multiple unfavorable rulings during his second term. The high court in February struck down emergency tariffs the president issued on imports last year and invalidated his Day 1 executive order restricting birthright citizenship last month.
But the high court has also ruled in the president's favor, including when it allowed him to fire Democrat Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The 6-3 decision, handed down along ideological lines, overturned the high court's 1935 decision in Humphrey's Executor v. United States — which afforded certain executive branch agencies a degree of independence from the White House for 91 years.
Under the latest ruling, the president has increased authority over federal agencies, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing the decision grants "far greater power than ever before" to Trump and future occupants of the Oval Office.
"It is true that today's decision does not eliminate the FTC or the many other agencies whose structures are implicated by overruling Humphrey's," Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. "It is undeniable, however, that those agencies will be transformed in ways that those who created them never could have expected and actively sought to avoid, fundamentally recalibrating the balance of power in this country in the process."
After the high court's term ended in late June, Trump said the Slaughter ruling was the "biggest and most consequential decision" it issued.
Overall, 55 percent of respondents to the Washington Post/Ipsos survey disapproved of the way the Supreme Court is doing its job. Just more than 4 in 10 respondents approved of the high court, while 4 percent skipped the question.
Respondents' views toward the Supreme Court were divided along partisan lines, with 75 percent of Democrats disapproving and 67 percent of Republicans approving. Just less than 6 in 10 respondents, meanwhile, disapproved of the court.
The survey had a margin of error of 1.9 percentage points.
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