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Americans’ trust in nation’s court system hits record low, survey finds
Legal Interview |
2025/01/13 09:34
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At a time of heightened political division, Americans’ confidence in their country’s judicial system and courts dropped to a record low of 35% this year, according to a new Gallup poll.
The United States saw a sharp drop of 24 percentage points over the last four years, setting the country apart from other wealthy nations where most people on average still express trust in their systems.
The results come after a tumultuous period that included the overturning of the nationwide right to abortion, the indictment of former President Donald Trump and the subsequent withdrawal of federal charges, and his attacks on the integrity of the judicial system.
The drop wasn’t limited to one end of the political spectrum. Confidence dropped among people who disapproved of the country’s leadership during Joe Biden’s presidency and among those who approved, according to Gallup. The respondents weren’t asked about their party affiliations.
It’s become normal for people who disapprove of the country’s leadership to also lose at least some confidence in the court system. Still, the 17-point drop recorded among that group under Biden was precipitous, and the cases filed against Trump were likely factors, Gallup said.
Among those who did approve of the country’s leadership, there was an 18-point decline between 2023 and 2024, possibly reflecting dissatisfaction with court rulings favoring Trump, Gallup found. Confidence in the judicial system had been above 60% among that group during the first three years of Biden’s presidency but nosedived this year.
Trump had faced four criminal indictments this year, but only a hush-money case in New York ended with a trial and conviction before he won the presidential race.
Since then, special counsel Jack Smith has ended his two federal cases, which pertained to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and allegations that he hoarded classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. A separate state election interference case in Fulton County, Georgia, is largely on hold. Trump denies wrongdoing in all.
Other Gallup findings have shown that Democrats’ confidence in the Supreme Court dropped by 25 points between 2021 and 2022, the year the justices overturned constitutional protections for abortion. Their trust climbed a bit, to 34%, in 2023, but dropped again to 24% in 2024. The change comes after a Supreme Court opinion that Trump and other former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution.
Trust in the court among Republicans, by contrast, reached 71% in 2024.
The judicial system more broadly also lost public confidence more quickly than many other U.S. institutions over the last four years. Confidence in the federal government, for example, also declined to 26%. That was a 20-point drop ? not as steep as the decline in confidence in the courts.
The trust drop is also steep compared with other countries around the world. Only a handful of other countries have seen larger drops during a four-year period. They include a 46-point drop in Myanmar during the period that overlapped the return of military rule in 2021, a 35-point drop in Venezuela amid deep economic and political turmoil from 2012 to 2016 and a 28-point drop in Syria in the runup and early years of its civil war.
The survey was based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,000 U.S. adults between June 28 and August 1.
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Trump asks the Supreme Court to block sentencing in his hush money case
Legal Interview |
2025/01/09 07:54
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President-elect Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to call off Friday’s sentencing in his hush money case in New York.
Trump’s lawyers turned to the nation’s highest court on Wednesday after New York courts refused to postpone the sentencing by Judge Juan M. Merchan, who presided over Trump’s trial and conviction last May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump has denied wrongdoing.
The justices asked for a response from prosecutors by Thursday morning. Trump’s team sought an immediate stay of the scheduled sentencing, saying it would wrongly restrict him as he prepares to take office. While Merchan has indicated he will not impose jail time, fines or probation, Trump’s lawyers argued a felony conviction would still have intolerable side effects.
The sentencing should be delayed as he appeals the conviction to “prevent grave injustice and harm to the institution of the Presidency and the operations of the federal government,” they argued.
The emergency motion is from lawyers John Sauer, Trump’s pick for solicitor general, who represents the government before the high court, and Todd Blanche, in line to be the second-ranking official at the Justice Department.
They also pointed to the Supreme Court ruling giving Trump and other presidents broad immunity from prosecutions over their actions in office, saying it supports their argument that his New York conviction should be overturned.
Their filing said the New York trial court “lacks authority to impose sentence and judgment on President Trump — or conduct any further criminal proceedings against him— until the resolution of his underlying appeal raising substantial claims of Presidential immunity, including by review in this Court if necessary.”
The Republican president-elect’s spokesman, Steven Cheung, called for the case to be dismissed in a statement. Trump simultaneously filed an emergency appeal in front of New York’s highest court.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, meanwhile, said it will respond in court papers. Trump’s convictions arose from what prosecutors said was an attempt to cover up a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election.
Daniels claims she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. He denies it.
The Supreme Court’s immunity opinion came in a separate election interference case against him, but Trump’s lawyers say it means some of the evidence used against him in his hush money trial should have been shielded by presidential immunity. That includes testimony from some White House aides and social media posts made while he was in office.
Merchan has disagreed, finding they would qualify as personal business. The Supreme Court’s immunity decision was largely about official acts of presidents while in office.
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Amazon workers strike at multiple facilities as Teamsters seek labor contract
Legal Interview |
2024/12/19 06:47
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Workers at seven Amazon facilities went on strike Thursday, an effort by the Teamsters to pressure the e-commerce company for a labor agreement during a key shopping period.
The Teamsters say the workers, who authorized strikes in the past few days, are joining the picket line after Amazon ignored a Sunday deadline the union set for contract negotiations. Amazon says it doesn’t expect an impact on its operations during what the union calls the largest strike against the company in U.S. history.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters say they represent nearly 10,000 workers at 10 Amazon facilities, a small portion of the 1.5 million people Amazon employs in its warehouses and corporate offices.
At one warehouse, located in New York City’s Staten Island borough, thousands of workers who voted for the Amazon Labor Union in 2022 and have since affiliated with the Teamsters. At the other facilities, employees - including many delivery drivers - have unionized with them by demonstrating majority support but without holding government-administered elections.
The strikes happening Thursday are taking place at one Amazon warehouse in San Francisco, California, and six delivery stations in southern California, New York City; Atlanta, Georgia, and Skokie, Illinois, according to the union’s announcement. Amazon workers at the other facilities are “prepared to join,” the union said.
“Amazon is pushing its workers closer to the picket line by failing to show them the respect they have earned,” Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien said in a statement.
The Seattle-based online retailer has been seeking to re-do the election that led to the union victory at the warehouse on Staten Island, which the Teamsters now represent. In the process, the company has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board. |
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US inflation ticked up last month as some price pressures remain persistent
Legal Interview |
2024/12/08 09:52
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Fueled by pricier used cars, hotel rooms and groceries, inflation in the United States moved slightly higher last month in the latest sign that some price pressures remain elevated.
Consumer prices rose 2.7% in November from a year earlier, up from a yearly figure of 2.6% in October. Excluding volatile food and energy costs, so-called core prices increased 3.3%, the same as in the previous month. Measured month to month, prices climbed 0.3% from October to November, the biggest such increase since April. Core prices also rose 0.3% for a fourth straight month.
Wednesday’s inflation figures from the Labor Department are the final major piece of data that Federal Reserve officials will consider before they meet next week to decide on interest rates. The relatively mild November increase won’t likely be enough to discourage the officials from cutting their key rate by a quarter-point. The probability of a rate cut next week, as envisioned by Wall Street traders, rose to 98% after Wednesday’s inflation report was released, according to futures pricing tracked by CME FedWatch.
“It’s generally in the ballpark of what the Fed would like to see,” said Jason Pride, chief investment strategist at Glenmede, a wealth management firm. Though sharp increases for such items as groceries and hotel rooms increased overall inflation last month, those categories are often volatile. Pride noted that the cost of services, such as rents, car insurance, and airline fares, cooled in November.
Last week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell suggested that with the economy generally healthy, the Fed could reduce its key rate slowly.
“We’re not quite there on inflation, but we’re making progress,” Powell said. “We can afford to be a little more cautious.”
With the job market cooling, growth in Americans’ paychecks has slowed from a nearly 6% annual pace in 2022 to about 4% now, a rate nearly consistent with inflation at the Fed’s 2% target. Powell has said he doesn’t think the current job market is a driver of higher prices.
Randy Carr, CEO of World Emblem, a maker of patches, labels and badges for companies, universities and law enforcement agencies, said he is providing smaller wage increases, in the 3% to 5% range, than his company did during the height of inflation.
“Things have kind of leveled off,” he said.
Carr’s customers, which include the company that makes emblems for UPS uniforms, generally won’t accept price hikes much more than 2% a year. So World Emblem aims to offset the cost of its higher wages through greater efficiencies in manufacturing.
In September, the Fed slashed its benchmark rate, which affects many consumer and business loans, by a sizable half-point. It followed that move with a quarter-point rate cut in November. Those cuts lowered the central bank’s key rate to 4.6%, down from a four-decade high of 5.3%.
Though inflation is now way below its peak of 9.1% in June 2022, average prices are still about 20% higher than they were three years ago — a major source of public discontent that helped drive President-elect Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
Grocery prices jumped last month, an uncomfortable reminder for consumers that food prices remain a big drag on households’ budgets. Beef prices leapt 3.1% just from October to November and are up 5% from a year earlier.
Egg prices, which have been volatile for more than two years, in part because of outbreaks of bird flu, soared 8.2% just last month. They are nearly 38% higher than a year ago.
Gas prices ticked up 0.6% from October to November, ending a string of declines. Still, gas is down more than 8% from a year earlier. Hotel prices leapt 3.2% from October to November and are 3.7% higher than a year ago.
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Court seems reluctant to block state bans on medical treatments for minors
Legal Interview |
2024/12/04 11:50
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Hearing a high-profile culture-war clash, a majority of the Supreme Court seemed reluctant Wednesday to block Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
The justices’ decision, not expected for several months, could affect similar laws enacted by another 25 states and a range of other efforts to regulate the lives of transgender people, including which sports competitions they can join and which bathrooms they can use.
The case is coming before a conservative-dominated court after a presidential election in which Donald Trump and his allies promised to roll back protections for transgender people.
In arguments that passed the two-hour mark Wednesday, five conservative justices voiced varying degrees of skepticism of arguments made by the Biden administration and lawyers for Tennessee families challenging the ban.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted in the majority in a 2020 case in favor of transgender rights, questioned whether judges, rather than lawmakers, should be weighing in on a question of regulating medical procedures, an area usually left to the states.
”The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Roberts said in an exchange with ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio.
The court’s three liberal justices seem firmly on the side of the challengers. But it’s not clear that any of the court’s six conservatives will go along. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion in 2020, has yet to say anything.
Four years ago, the court ruled in favor of Aimee Stephens, who was fired by a Michigan funeral home after she informed its owner that she was a transgender woman. The court held that transgender people, as well as gay and lesbian people, are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace.
The Biden administration and the families and health care providers who challenged the Tennessee law are urging the justices to apply the same sort of analysis that the majority, made up of liberal and conservative justices, embraced in the case four years ago when it found that “sex plays an unmistakable role” in employers’ decisions to punish transgender people for traits and behavior they otherwise tolerate.
The issue in the Tennessee case is whether the law violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which requires the government to treat similarly situated people the same.
Tennessee’s law bans puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors, but not “across the board,” lawyers for the families wrote in their Supreme Court brief. The lead lawyer, Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union, is the first openly transgender person to argue in front of the justices. |
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