SCOTUS Approval Rating Dips to 44 Percent

Looks like Americans' growing disappointment with Washington, D.C., has spread to all three branches of government.

A new New York Times/CBS News poll suggests that only 44 percent of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing and three in four say the justices are sometimes unable to set their personal or political views aside when making a decision.

As the Times explains, those numbers "are a fresh indication that the court's standing with the public has slipped significantly in the past quarter-century." The high court's approval rating was in the mid-60s in the late 1980s and hovered around 50 percent at the turn of the century.

The survey also found that regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on the 2010 health care law, they're bound to further anger a large chunk of the public. Forty-one percent of respondents said they want to see the justices eliminate the entire law, while 24 percent said they want it to remain as is and 27 percent want the justices to overturn only the individual mandate that requires most Americans to have health insurance or pay a penalty.

Americans also expressed dissatisfaction with the judicial system itself. Six out of ten respondents agreed that life tenures for justices are "a bad thing because it gives them too much power."

The congressional approval rating was at 17 percent in April and President Obama's recent approval rating at 47 percent, according to Gallup polling.