With a Supreme Court ruling expected by the end of June, the fate of ObamaCare is at the back of everyone’s minds right now. Unfortunately for Big-O, more than two-thirds of Americans want ObamaCare gutted, neutered, or thrown out completely, according to a poll conducted by the New York Times and CBS News . A mere 24% want the law to stand, unaltered.
The new poll doesn’t show too much change between public sentiment now and before the Supreme Court first faced the challenge against President Obama’s controversial healthcare reform in March. As for the now, almost half of those polled, 41%, say that the law should be dropped without a second thought. Of the remainder, 27% seem to accept most of the reforms, but specifically say that the individual mandate needs to be dropped. Only 24% want the law to remain as it is.
One of the main problems with the law is that it has faced intense criticism and opposition from the right, while only fetching mediocre support from the left in recent months. Of course, two-thirds of Republicans want the law gone. That should be obvious. But only a meager 43% of Democrats want the law preserved in its entirety. On the Independent side, 70% want the law to be changed or dropped, with most of them favoring the “dropped” option. Only 22% of Independents want the law to stay as is.
The demographic spread of the poll yields some interesting results as well. One-third of the respondents with a college degree want the law upheld, while only 20% without support it.
But will nationwide sentiment affect the decision-making process of the Supreme Court Justices?
Probably not.
“Supreme Court justices care more about the views of academics, journalists and other elites than they do about public opinion,” said authors of a 2010 study on the subject published in The Georgetown Law Journal. “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 authors of the study, Lawrence Baum of Ohio State University and Neal Devins of the College of William & Mary, concluded that Supreme Court Justices are pretty uninterested in what we have to say.
Now for the boring stuff: 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.
Do you support ObamaCare? What do you think the Supreme Court will decide?