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SALT LAKE CITY — Utahns are split on whether or not they support 18-year term limits for U.S. Supreme Court justices.
A recent Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll conducted by HarrisX surveyed 800 registered Utah voters. The poll showed 42% of Utahns support President Joe Biden's proposal for term limits for justices. Another 41% said they oppose the proposal, while 17% said they don't know.
Biden proposed term limits for the Supreme Court in a July op-ed for The Washington Post. He said based on a report from the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, he thought 18 years was the appropriate length.
"Term limits would help ensure that the court's membership changes with some regularity. That would make timing for court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary," wrote Biden. "It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come. I support a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court."
In addition to term limits, Biden also proposed ensuring the Supreme Court's ethics code is binding. And he called for a constitutional amendment to supersede the Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity. The ruling said presidents have broad immunity for official acts while in office but not necessarily for other actions.
"I am calling for a constitutional amendment called the No One Is Above the Law Amendment," Biden wrote. "It would make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office."
National polls show support for term limits. A University of Massachusetts-Amherst poll found 65% of respondents in favor of justices serving a set number of terms. Another poll from AP-NORC had 67% of respondents saying justices should have term limits. Eighty-two percent of Democrats and 57% of Republicans supported limits.
The Deseret News asked Utah voters what they thought about one of the reforms — Supreme Court term limits. Here is the data broken down.
What else the survey data showed
A slight majority of registered Republicans (52%) said they oppose term limits and 75% of registered Democrats said they support term limits. Forty-eight percent of independent and unregistered voters support term limits, 32% said they oppose them and 20% said they did not know.
There was not much variation between people ages 18-34 and people ages 35-49 for support of term limits: 45% and 44%, respectively. The only age group to have majority opposition to term limits is people 65 or older.
Rural Utah voters (53%) are more likely to oppose term limits than voters in suburban (40%) or urban areas (34%). The group of these three most likely to say they did not know whether or not they support term limits was urban voters at 19%.
Broken down by education, registered voters with no college degree (42%) and those with a college degree were about equally likely to support term limits. Those with no college degree were more likely to say they did not know if they support or oppose.
Voters who make $100,000 or more were the most likely group by income to say they support term limits at 47%. In the $50,000 to $100,000 income bracket, voters were more likely to oppose term limits (43%) than support them (38%). But voters who make less than $50,000 were most likely to support term limits (42%) than oppose them (35%).
Vice President Kamala Harris voters overwhelmingly support Supreme Court term limits at 75% and the majority of former President Donald Trump voters oppose them.
Broken down by religion, a plurality of all Christians who were polled say they oppose term limits (47%) and 36% said they support them. Forty-eight percent of Latter-day Saints polled said they support them and 35% opposed them. The majority of atheists and agnostics support term limits (67%) and only 22% said they oppose them.
