But many opponents of the decision claim it isn’t just wrong, or dangerous, but ultimately corrupt—the result of the Court having come under the control of a right-wing political faction: The Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the body the “MAGA Supreme Court”—a jibe associating it with the political movement around the former president Donald Trump—adding that “political influence trumps all in our courts today.” The reaction to a recent Court decision limiting the U.S. federal government’s authority to regulate businesses has been similar. It’s now conventional wisdom on the political left that the Court has been seized by a group of extreme conservatives.

On the right, meanwhile, it’s long been conventional wisdom that American society’s core institutions—not just higher education and the media but the state itself, including the court system—have been captured by a left-wing clique. It’s an idea Trump has invoked regularly. Now, facing several prosecutions, he argues the Democrats are using the legal system against him in a political “witch-hunt”—an argument popular among his supporters and at least plausible to others beyond them.

What to make of these competing claims?

Christopher W. Schmidt is a professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law. To Schmidt, there’s nothing new as such in today’s incursions of politics into the courts. It happened dramatically in the Civil Rights Era of the 1950s and ’60s, for example. And it’s happened chronically in subtler ways before and since. What’s new is how unwilling and unable the institutions around them are to support them—the Supreme Court, above all. When its integrity was challenged during the Civil Rights Era, the American legal profession, the mainstream media, and a bipartisan political center all rallied behind it—effectively. Now, with the politicization of the Court intensifying, support for it, and its fundamental legitimacy, is thinner and more fragmented than ever. Yet these institutions, and the public at large, are no less interested in it. To the contrary—making the Court a focal point of nearly relentless controversy …

“A lot of the criticism of the Court is just political rhetoric. Following the Trump immunity ruling, for instance, the Democratic member of the House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for judicial impeachment. Senator Chuck Schumer described the Supreme Court as a “MAGA” institution. And I just saw that $10 million is being funneled into a progressive advocacy group to push for Court reform. There’s real dissatisfaction with the Court behind these challenges, but most of them are really meant to energize voters for the November election. Which is fairly routine by now.”

“There were the anti-communist fervors of the 1940s and 1950s, when people believed that the elites holding the levers of power were working to advance a progressive, anti-conservative agenda. And that conspiratorial tradition has survived into today’s politics. Trump is making it more extreme in some ways. He’s certainly mainstreaming it. But it’s not a new sentiment. What’s new is the way you see it being politically mobilized. That’s a product of political polarization—and it’s a product of technological change, specifically of social media.”

“The foundation stones that have historically held the Supreme Court up when it’s created controversy have been falling one by one. There’s a press corps, especially on the left, that’s committed to challenging the Court now. The American legal profession used to be institutionally committed, but that’s less clear now. Mainstream politicians have begun challenging the Court. All the props have fallen now. And when the Court is criticized, whether from the left or the right, there’s just no concerted pushback.”

The Bill Comes Due

The Conservatives’ political performance hasn’t helped. In power since 2010, they’ve been through several years now of scandals and failures: After Boris Johnson was forced to resign as prime minister in July 2022, his successor, Liz Truss, managed the shortest tenure of any PM in modern British history.

Meanwhile, though, Britain’s economy has been regularly lagging behind the rest of Europe and the U.S.—ever since the U.K. left the European Union in 2020. And the Conservatives’ electoral decline almost perfectly mirrors the decline in public support for their handling of the economy: In March 2020 polling by the Pew Research Center, about 47 percent of respondents said that Conservatives were best at handling the economy. That number had dropped to 21 percent by this June. Brexit, which Johnson had championed, also became a major problem for the party. In April 2021 public-opinion polling, Britons looked favorably on the decision to leave the EU, with 46 percent saying it was the right move and 43 percent saying it was wrong. But by April of this year, 55 percent now said it was wrong to leave, and only 31 percent said it was right.

In November 2021 and July 2022, Matthias Matthijs examined the U.K.’s unstable trajectory after Brexit. As Matthijs sees it, Johnson’s backing for Brexit won over many Labour voters to the Conservatives. But, Matthijs says, Johnson and other Tory elites knew that withdrawing from the European Single Market and EU Customs Union would create new barriers to trade on the continent—meaning, for whatever other benefits Brexit might bring, real economic costs. Since leaving the EU, the U.K.’s currency has weakened, and it’s experienced higher inflation than its European neighbors.

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