New Poll: The Supreme Court and the Health Care Law

By Adam Liptak and Allison Kopicki for the New York Times –

More than two-thirds of Americans hope the Supreme Court will overturn some or all of the 2010 health care law, according to a new poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS News. Just 24 percent said they hoped the court “would keep the entire health care law in place.”

The Supreme Court is expected to decide a challenge to the law by the end of this month.

Forty-one percent of those surveyed said the court should strike down the entire law, and another 27 percent said the justices should overturn only the individual mandate, which requires most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty.

These numbers have not changed much in recent months and appeared to be largely unaffected by the more than six hours of arguments in the Supreme Court in March.

There was greater Republican opposition to the law than Democratic support. About two-thirds of Republicans in the recent survey said the entire law should be overturned, while 43 percent of Democrats said all of the law should be upheld.

More than 70 percent of independent voters said they wanted to see some or all of the law struck down, with a majority saying they hoped to see the whole law overturned. Twenty-two percent of independents said they hoped the entire law would survive.

Responses varied by education, too. Nearly a third of respondents with a college education said they would like to see the law upheld, compared with about 20 percent of those without a college degree.

Legal scholars and political scientists are divided over whether the justices take account of public opinion in making their decisions.

In a 2010 study published in The Georgetown Law Journal, Lawrence Baum of Ohio State University and Neal Devins of the College of William & Mary concluded that the justices were not much concerned with mass opinion.

“Supreme Court justices care more about the views of academics, journalists and other elites than they do about public opinion,” they wrote. “This is true of nearly all justices and is especially true of swing justices, who often cast the critical votes in the court’s most visible decisions.”

The nationwide poll is based on telephone interviews conducted May 31 through June 3 on land-lines and cellphones with 976 adults, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.