Law Professor Answers Supreme Court Questions

I'm Stephen Vladeck,

author and professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet.

This is Supreme Court Support.

[lively music]

@Cryptoking asks,

Why do Supreme Court justices receive life appointments

while every other type of judge has retirement ages?

So this is actually a real disconnect

between the federal courts and state courts.

Most states have imposed retirement ages

on their judges and justices.

The federal courts have not.

And so under Article III of the Federal Constitution,

the Supreme Court,

the intermediate federal courts of appeals,

the 94 federal district courts, all of them served

during what the Constitution calls good behavior.

And the idea here was to provide a modicum

of protection against being forced off the bench

for anything other than the kind of misconduct

that might warrant impeachment

by the House of Representatives and removal by the Senate.

@kpolaprateek asks,

So how do Supreme Court justices get appointed?

The appointments process is actually pretty straightforward.

The president gets to nominate anyone,

doesn't matter how old they are, where they're from,

what their qualifications are,

to be a Supreme Court justice,

and as long as they're confirmed

by a majority of the Senate, they got the job.

VAWNavyVet asks, Are confirmation hearings effective

in preventing unqualified appointments

or have they become mere formalities?

You know, this really does vary

and has varied historically based upon who the President is

and based upon which party controls the Senate.

There have been moments in American history

where the Senate really has exercised

a rigorous oversight role.

In vetting the Supreme Court's nominees,

there have been some who have been blocked by the Senate,

some who were withdrawn

'cause they didn't have the votes in the Senate.

But I think what we've seen lately

is when the presidents of the same party

as a majority of the Senate, there really is a push

to get through the President's nominees.

And so I think we've seen less of that criticism

from the Senate in recent nomination processes.

Professional_Cat_437, Could somebody explain

what the 2016 drama of Obama being unable

to appoint a new Supreme Court justice was?

So in February of 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia,

who was in many respects the leader

of the court's then extinct four conservative justice wing

unexpectedly passed away while he was on the court,

opening up a seat for President Obama to presumably fill.

President Obama quickly nominated an incredibly moderate

and relatively older candidates,

then DC Circuit Judge Merrick Garland, but the Republicans

who at the time had a majority in the Senate banded together

and committed to provide no process,

not even to have a vote up or down

on Merrick Garland as a nominee,

but rather to keep that seat open

through the November, 2016 presidential election

until President Trump was sworn in in January,

at which point he nominated Neil Gorsuch

and the Senate confirmed Gorsuch to fill that seat.

So the Constitution does not require the Senate to vote.

Really historically, the expectation has been

that if the Senate were going to shirk its duty

in such a shameless and transparent way,

it would face political consequences for doing so.

If anything, in 2016, the opposite happened

where the Senate holding that seat open

provided a number of folks

who might not otherwise have wanted to

with reasons to vote for President Trump.

It's also worth keeping in mind

that when the Constitution was written,

we didn't have political parties.

Had the founders known that we were gonna have

really a deeply entrenched two party system,

it's not hard to imagine

they would've done some things very differently.

@DannyjeGga asks, The Supreme Court is not apolitical.

Has it ever been?

We should distinguish here between a court that is political

and the court that is partisan.

The Supreme Court has always been political

in the sense that it's always been involved

in institutional conversations

with the other branches of government.

Some of the court's most important early decisions

come as part of a pretty sophisticated

inner branch conversation

with President Jefferson with Congress.

It's only since 2010 that we have a Supreme Court

where every justices' ideology

aligns with the party of the President who appointed them.

That's part of why today the court

seems so much more divided along partisan lines

than was true as recently as 20 years ago.

From Reddit, How does the process

of a court case going to the Supreme Court work?

Just about every case the Supreme Court hears

has gone through multiple levels

of litigation in lower courts.

Those lower courts could be lower federal courts

or they could be state courts.

And under both the Constitution

and the relevant statutes Congress has passed,

once the case has gone through those lower courts,

the Supreme Court has the power to hear an appeal

if whoever lost in the lower courts

wants the court to do so.

And if it's coming from a lower state court,

as long as there's a federal issue in the case,

as long as the case turns on federal law,

the Supreme Court has the power to hear it.

This is actually a place where the Supreme Court's power

and its docket has actually shifted a lot over time.

So from 1789 when the Supreme Court was created until 1891,

the Supreme Court actually had to hear every single appeal

that Congress told it to.

It's only since 1891

that Congress has broadly given the justices

the power to pick and choose

almost all of the cases they hear.

That process is given this Latin term certiorari,

which we abbreviate to cert 'cause we can't really spell it,

and the basic gist is the Supreme Court votes

and it takes four of the nine justices

to agree to hear a case for the court to take it up.

What that means, perhaps, surprisingly,

is that actually almost all of the cases

the Supreme Court decides these days

are cases that the justices have specifically chosen to hear

and not just cases that were foisted upon them.

@CS_Westbrook asks, Do you know approximately

how many cases the Supreme Court takes every year?

The Supreme Court receives

somewhere between 4,500 and 6,000 requests every year

to hear appeals, whether from the lower federal courts

or from the state courts.

It only takes about 65 or 70 of them.

What that means is that in 98 to 99% of those cases,

it's actually those lower courts that get the last word

and the justices leave those lower court decisions intact.

So the process the Supreme Court follows

for picking and choosing cases is very secretive,

but basically the parties file briefs

where the party that wants the Supreme Court

to hear the case says, Here's why you should take it.

The party that one below says,

No, here's why you shouldn't take it.

And the justices and their clerks debate internally

what to do and they ultimately vote,

should we hear this case or not?

@KenHicken asks, Yes or no.

Can the Supreme Court be expanded?

Yes, the Constitution does not provide any limit

on the size of the Supreme Court.

It gives that power to Congress.

Congress used that power a number of times between 1789

and 1869 to change the size of the Supreme Court.

It's really a question about politics,

whether it's a good idea and whether there are the votes.

And at least since 1869, the answer to one,

if not both of those questions, has consistently been no.

An anonymous Reddit user asks,

What's the purpose of dissenting opinions?

Sometimes a justice will write a dissenting opinion

to make clear to their colleagues

just how wrong they think the majority is.

Indeed, we have examples of a proposed dissenting opinion,

actually persuaded enough justices that it's correct

that it became the majority opinion.

Sometimes the goal of a dissenting opinion

is to lay down a marker so that even if the Supreme Court's

not gonna reach the right answer, maybe other actors can.

A famous example of this is when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

wrote a dissent in a case called Ledbetter about pay equity

that called on Congress to fix the relevant federal statutes

with regard to pay equity in the workplace.

Congress did and it actually passed a statute

called the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

in response to justice Ginsburg's dissenting opinion.

And sometimes dissents really are meant more for the public

where the dissenting justice understands

that they don't have enough votes

for their position on the court,

but they're writing for posterity.

They think that one day the law will catch up with them.

And some of the great examples of this

are from Justice John Marshall Harlan,

who dissented in cases like Plessy versus Ferguson,

which established the principle of separate but equal

in a way that actually we now rely upon

that has largely become the law of the land.

@real_miss_kim asks,

Which Supreme Court Justice retires next?

And who replaces him or her?

So if history has taught us anything,

it's that it's not always who you'd expect.

I think for obvious reasons,

most of the attention right now

is on justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito

since they are two of the three longest serving

Republican appointed justices on the court

and the ones who I think would be most willing

to have President Trump pick their successors.

But Justice Thomas is also just a couple years away

from the all time longevity record.

For Supreme Court justice

is something I suspect he's interested in.

If you really forced me to bet,

I would say Justice Alito is probably at the top of the list

for the next justice to retire.

But, you know, I'm glad

I don't have to put any real money on it.

Weary-Farmer-4894 asks, Did RBG destroy her legacy

by not retiring during Obama's presidency?

You know, this is a real debate,

not just about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,

but about what a Supreme Court justice's

central obligations are.

Famously, Justice Ginsburg did not retire

when President Obama was in office

and Democrats controlled the Senate.

And that meant that when she passed away

after a long battle with cancer, in September, 2020,

it was President Trump who was able to fill her seat

as he did with Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

I think it's really tricky to think about this question

because retiring solely for partisan political purposes,

even if it's something that justices do,

is maybe not in the best long-term interest

of the institution.

If we view the court through the lens

of just who controls which seats,

then we really are accepting the premise

that the court is a partisan institution

and not just a judicial one.

At the same time,

justices who care about their legacies have to care,

especially in this day and age,

about those partisan politics.

Only a justice knows their body,

only a justice knows their mind,

but I think it certainly looks in retrospect

like it probably would've been better for Justice Ginsburg

if she cared about such things,

to step down when President Obama

could have chosen her successor instead of President Trump.

@PoBoyReeves asks,

How ugly was the Kavanaugh confirmation?

It was pretty ugly.

There were seemingly quite plausible charges

of sexual misconduct on the part

of a much, much younger Brett Kavanaugh.

You had a rushed FBI report

and you had I think a fair amount of railroading

on both sides to the fight

over who would replace justice Anthony Kennedy.

And then we have to remember that part

of what was going on there, was you had the Justice

who had become the median vote on the court.

It was his seat that was at issue,

and I think that's part of why

you saw the emotions get so high.

How do we fix that?

Well, I think this is a larger

and deeper conversation about our institutions

and about pushing presidents, pushing senators,

pushing everybody to a point

where we view the courts in general

and the Supreme Court in particular

as a critically important check

on the other branches of government,

a check where we're gonna want judges and justices

not just who believe things we agree with,

but who are going to assert the power of the courts

over the other branches of government.

That to me is the real unfortunate consequence

of the Kavanaugh confirmation, is that if anything

that's moved us more into our political corners

and not more toward

that kind of institutional understanding.

@theylove_sierra, How did Plessy versus Ferguson

change law and society?

So Plessy versus Ferguson is the infamous 1896 decision

in which the Supreme Court articulated the separate

but equal understanding

for racial discrimination in public places.

You can draw a straight line from Plessy versus Ferguson

to the era of Jim Crow, to the idea

that you would have segregated drinking facilities,

segregated schools, segregated bathrooms

in cities and jurisdictions,

especially throughout the south.

I think there's a debate

about just how much Plessy itself caused those changes

or how much Plessy at least meant the courts

had no way to stop those changes,

which in many respects were already well underway.

Indeed, it wouldn't be

until Brown versus Board of Education in 1954

and the Civil Rights Movement

that Brown was an early part of

that you really see efforts to push back against

to dismantle Jim Crow.

The Supreme Court's obviously part of that story.

It's probably a little much to say

that the court was solely responsible for it.

@SteveO2385 asks, When did the left

ever have control of SCOTUS?

Seriously, when was the last time

there was a liberal majority?

So I think there's actually some debate about this

because until 2010, you had a long history

of Supreme Court appointments

that were not necessarily party and ideology aligned.

For example, Justice William Brennan, who for a long time

was the liberal lion of the Warren Court,

was appointed by a Republican president,

by Dwight Eisenhower.

The last time that a majority of the Supreme Court

included justices appointed by Democratic presidents,

which might be one way to think about this question,

was May 14th, 1969.

That was the day on which Justice Abe Fortas

resigned from the court.

Actually Republican presidents

would have the next 11 appointments to the Supreme Court,

which is a big part

of why there was such this profound shift

in the court's jurisprudence started in 1970.

Reddit user asked, At the time of Roe versus Wade,

was the Supreme Court overwhelmingly liberal?

Not necessarily.

I mean, the Supreme Court in 1973

when Roe versus Wade was decided

was in some respects a court in transition.

And so you had a seven to two majority in that case,

but there were multiple justices in the majority

who had been appointed by Republican presidents,

and one of the two dissenters, Justice Byron White,

was actually a democratic appointee.

He was appointed by President John F. Kennedy.

At the time Roe versus Wade was decided,

the question of the constitutionality

of protections for abortion

just didn't quite divide us so strictly

into ideological camps

as it came to in the years and decades to follow.

@koreflautas asks,

How did Citizens United affect elections?

So the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United

is actually part of a larger series of decisions

in which the Supreme Court

has interpreted the First Amendment

to prohibit a number of restrictions on campaign finance

and to prohibit a number

of campaign finance reform initiatives enacted by Congress.

The result has been a much larger amount

of dark money in our elections, local elections,

state elections, federal elections.

The real impact here

is not that it's obviously pro-Republican or pro-Democratic.

It's pro-money.

Money interests have had much more say

in our elections in the last 15 or 20 years.

Certainly then was true for a long time before that.

@jsc1835 asks, Trump is asking the Supreme Court

to partly allow birthright citizenship restrictions.

Will the Supreme Court allow this

breach of the Constitution?

This is getting a bit into the weeds,

but one of the things that's really tricky

about the three birthright citizenship cases

that the Supreme Court is deciding during its current term

is that the court is being asked not to uphold the policy

but rather just to let it go into effect

as applied to at least some people

through a procedural debate.

Basically the argument is the lower courts ruled too broadly

in blocking President Trump's efforts

to limit birthright citizenship.

I suspect that the court is going to narrow

those lower court rulings in at least some way,

but also that either the Supreme Court

or the lower courts pretty quickly

are gonna reach the end of this case

and rule conclusively that the president's efforts

to limit birthright citizenship are in fact unlawful,

which will mitigate the effect of a procedural ruling

that makes those lower court decisions less effective.

@julietfes asks, In the country's history,

has a Supreme Court justice ever resigned?

So a number have resigned.

Perhaps the most notorious resignation was in 1969

when Justice Abe Fortas resigned

because of alleged improprieties

with a financier named Louis Wolfson.

But there actually have been a number of justices

who have resigned for other reasons, for health reasons,

for personal reasons, in some cases

because they wanted or were appointed to different jobs.

It's really only in the last 10 or 15 years

that we've seen high profile deaths by sitting justices.

We actually had gone a very long time.

From 1954 to 2005,

there wasn't a single justice who died on the bench.

The norm had become resigned before.

The actuarial tables catch up with you.

@thedrivein47 asks,

What are the duties of the chief justice?

So the chief justice is in some respects

the first among equals.

He doesn't have special extra powers

that the other eight justices lack.

What makes him special is he is the senior justice.

He basically presides over all of the court sessions.

He gets to decide whenever he's in the majority

who's gonna write the decision for the court.

And he is in various respects the ceremonial figurehead

of the judicial branch

as set out in Article III of the Constitution.

But when the justices are in their conference room

and they're voting on cases,

the chief justice really is just one of nine.

@christo53294495 ask, Can you tell me in US history

which president has appointed a justice

representing the opposite of his beliefs?

Perhaps the most famous of these is President Eisenhower

appointing Justice William Brennan in 1956,

is a Catholic democratic state court judge from New Jersey,

not because of his ideology, but perhaps despite it.

But in general, I mean, really until the 1950s and 1960s,

there are a lot of examples throughout American history

of president's prioritizing geographical diversity,

other types of experience,

of presidents cashing in political chips,

or even in some cases of presidents

using Supreme Court appointments

to neutralize the folks they were, you know, rivals with.

It's really only in the last generation

that we've come to think of Supreme Court appointments

as being purely about maximizing ideology.

A Reddit user asks,

Why did LBJ nominate Thurgood Marshall?

Justice Marshall, when he was nominated

to the court in 1967, was the first justice

in the court's history who was not white,

and this was a really important step by President Johnson.

President thought it was long past time

that the Supreme Court have a Black justice.

Indeed, he actually manipulates the circumstances

just to create a seat for Justice Marshall.

He took Ramsey Clark, who was the son

of a sitting Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark,

and he appointed Ramsey Clark as the Attorney General.

That would have meant Tom Clark would've had to recuse

from every case in which the federal government was a party.

LBJ knew he wouldn't do that.

LBJ knew that Tom Clark would resign from the court,

thereby creating the seat for Thurgood Marshall.

@punycitizen asks, How does the shadow docket work?

The shadow docket is a term that was coined

by a University of Chicago law professor Will Baude in 2015,

and it was meant to describe everything

that the Supreme Court does other than the 65 or so cases.

It decides after briefing an argument every year.

So that includes all of the rulings

where the Supreme Court declines to take up an appeal

and it includes this other chunk of decisions

where the Supreme Court is asked

to provide something called emergency relief.

Emergency relief is when you have a case in the lower courts

that has not gotten to the Supreme Court yet,

but one party, presumably whoever lost below,

wants to change the status quo

while the case works its way to the Supreme Court.

And that's become an increasingly prominent part

of the Supreme Court's workload.

It's why the shadow docket has become so much more,

I think, a subject of popular interest,

especially as we've seen

during the second Trump administration,

so many cases where the federal government

is asking the Supreme Court

to temporarily pause lower court rulings

blocking various policies

while those cases worked their way through the courts.

A Reddit user asked,

What was the first Second Amendment Supreme Court case?

Really, the first time the Supreme Court

discussed the Second Amendment in detail was in the 1930s

in a case called Miller where the court basically said

that the Second Amendment

didn't protect an individual right to self-defense.

It was mostly a collective right

to resist tyrannical government.

Of course, it was that understanding

that the Supreme Court overruled.

In 2008, since the Supreme Court's decision

in its five four decision in Heller,

what we've seen is a lot more litigation challenging

and succeeding in striking down limits on gun sales,

gun possession across the country.

yukicola asks, What do the US Supreme Court justices

actually do during a regular workday?

Most of the justices work goes on in their chambers.

In the Supreme Court's official headquarters in Washington,

a building, by the way, the court has only had since 1935,

the justices each have their own chambers,

they have their own staffs, they have four law clerks

who are recent law school graduates,

and of course they have administrative support as well.

And most of what they're doing is reviewing cases,

either which cases they're going to choose to hear or not,

or in the subset of cases the justices have chosen to hear,

reading the briefs, preparing for argument,

writing opinions, reviewing other justices' opinions.

The justices really only gather in person formally

when they're on the hearing arguments

or handing down decisions

or when they are back in what's called their conference,

where they decide how they're gonna rule on specific cases.

BlanckToHideFromWife,

Can the US Supreme Court in practice make law?

This has been really a bit of a metaphysical debate

among scholars for a very long time.

Everyone agrees that judges

and the Supreme Court in particular

have a responsibility to interpret the law.

The difference between that

and what we might call making law is often elusive.

And actually there are contexts in which we expect judges

to do more than just resolve ambiguity,

perhaps to fill in language that Congress

or the state legislature has left out.

So yes, I mean I think there are lots of contexts

in which the judges and justices

are and should be allowed to make law.

We just tend to think of those in the context

of interpreting statutes, constitutional provisions,

and other legal texts.

Hagisman asks, Ideally, should the Supreme Court

lean toward originalism or living constitutionalism?

This is an age old debate about how judges and justices

should interpret the text of the Constitution

when that text is ambiguous.

No one really disputes that when the Constitution

says the President has to be 35 years old, it means 35.

But when the Eighth Amendment says something

like there can be no such thing as cruel

and unusual punishment, that of course raises questions.

What makes a particular punishment cruel and unusual?

Throughout the court's history,

one of the ways we've addressed this issue

is by having justices who were diverse,

who were from different parts of the country,

who are from different backgrounds,

who had different methodological commitments.

And it's really only in the last generation

that there has been this concerted push toward the idea

that there really can only be one accepted way

to interpret the Constitution.

I'll just say that I think the better answer

is different people are gonna have different commitments

based upon their own views, their own experiences,

their own background,

and part of why we have nine Supreme Court justices

and not just one, part of why we have humans

interpreting these texts and not machines,

is because those differences,

that diversity is actually a really important part

of the project of legal interpretation.

@DJvsEverybody asks, How do state's rights

fit into having the Supreme Court

have the ability to overrule state courts?

The Constitution divides sovereignty

between the federal government and the states.

One of the ways it does so

is it leaves questions of state law

up to state Supreme Court.

So if the Missouri Supreme Court

interprets Missouri law in a particular way,

the Supreme Court has no power to disagree with them.

The difference is when it's about federal law.

And so if a state court interprets a federal statute

or the federal constitution

or if a state court interprets state law

in a way that is inconsistent with federal law

or the federal constitution,

that's where the US Supreme Court is able to come in

and is able to reverse that decision.

amwreck asks, How does the Supreme Court

go about overturning a previous ruling?

It's actually not that complicated procedurally.

It's just fraught in the sense

that it tends to be controversial

when the Supreme Court overturns a prior decision.

There's nothing that actually prevents any justices

in any case from saying,

Hey, we actually think this prior decision is wrong

and should be overruled.

You need a majority, of course,

and presumably you need some compelling reason

why that older decision should be overruled.

The principle of stare decisis is the idea

that all things being equal,

court should follow the decisions of their predecessors.

If and when there are especially persuasive reasons

to overrule a prior precedent,

that's when the court is I think more free to do so.

kwertix asks, Why does the US Supreme Court

rely on presidential cases?

This isn't just the US Supreme Court.

This is actually a feature

of any so-called common law legal system.

And the idea is that precedent is itself part of our law,

that what separates judges

and justices from ordinary politicians

is that they're not just voting their preferences

in every individual case,

that there is actually this abstract idea of what the law is

that binds not just current judges but future judges

until and unless there's some compelling reason

to overrule it.

That's not just a sort of principle of laziness.

It's actually a really important foundation

of what separates judicial power

from ordinary political power.

@Andrevin20, Do I think the Supreme Court

was always nine seats?

How did it get to nine?

In fact, I know it wasn't.

The Constitution itself says nothing

about how big the Supreme Court ought to be.

Congress, when it created the court in 1789,

started with a very strange number with six.

That was really based

on how many lower appeals courts there were.

Between 1789 and 1869,

the size of the court fluctuates seven times

between as many as 10 justices

for a brief period in the 1860s

and at one point as few as five justices.

It's only in April of 1869

that Congress for the first time hardwires the number nine

into the identity of the Supreme Court

and we've been set at nine ever since.

There have been proposals at various points

in the recent past,

especially during the Biden administration,

to pack the court by adding perhaps four seats.

Practically, you're never gonna be able to do it

unless the same party simultaneously controls

not just the White House, but both chambers of Congress

and has a filibuster proof majority in the Senate.

And in the long-term,

I mean, if you're expanding the court solely

to maximize short-term partisan political advantage,

I think that probably re-downs to the detriment

of the integrity of the court, of public faith in the court,

even if part of why folks are proposing that as a reform

is because they think that damage has already happened.

I'm not sure this is an example

of two wrongs making the right.

@myopinion6810 asks,

How do Supreme Court justices get impeached?

Has that ever happened?

So it's the exact same process in the Constitution

for impeaching a Supreme Court justice

as it is for the President.

It takes a majority

of the House of Representatives to impeach,

two-thirds of the Senate to vote to convict

and thereby remove.

It's happened exactly once with the Supreme Court Justice.

In 1804, the sort of Jeffersonian controlled Congress

impeached and tried to remove Justice Samuel Chase,

who has perhaps the greatest nickname

in Supreme Court history.

He was known as Old Bacon Face.

And Justice Chase was impeached because the Jeffersonians

thought that he was basically a partisan hack.

But the Senate refused to remove Justice Chase.

It wasn't that they decided that he was not a partisan.

It was that they decided that wasn't enough,

and that to remove a Supreme Court justice,

you need actual misconduct.

And that's really stood as a pretty important precedent

for judicial independence ever since.

Odd-Flower2744, What actually happens

if Supreme Court decisions are just ignored?

What mechanisms actually enforce a Supreme Court decision?

It depends on who's doing the ignoring.

Of course, if it's private parties, there are lots of ways

to compel their obedience to Supreme Court decisions,

whether it's monetary sanctions or otherwise.

It is, of course, trickier

if the relevant party is the federal government.

Historically, the way the Supreme Court has been allowed to,

been able to effectuate its mandates

is because the political consequences

of a president defy on the Supreme Court

have just been too high.

President Nixon turned over the Watergate tapes,

including the tape that led directly to his resignation

because he concluded with the support of his advisors

that he couldn't defy the Supreme Court.

President Eisenhower sent the army into Little Rock in 1957

to desegregate Central High School

because he was persuaded

that he couldn't not enforce the Supreme Court decision

in Brown versus Board of Education.

That's why the Supreme Court's legitimacy

why public faith in the court is so important

because if we get to a point where a president

could stick his thumb in the Supreme Court's eye

and have no similar political backlash,

that would be the point where the Supreme Court's power

as an institution would be critically

and perhaps irrevocably damaged.

@ajebolawyer asks, Do I know the difference

between the Supreme Court of a state of the United States

and the Supreme Court of the United States?

In fact, I do. So every state has a Supreme Court.

Actually, Texas and Oklahoma have two,

one each for criminal cases and for civil cases,

but those courts are principally tasked

with interpreting state law.

Sometimes you can have federal issues

come up in those cases.

A state criminal prosecution, for example,

can raise Fourth Amendment issues.

But typically the state Supreme Courts get the last word

on the meaning of their state's laws

and the US Supreme Court gets the last word

on the meaning of federal law.

A Reddit user asks, What government entity has oversight

over the US Supreme Court

that's now showing almost open corruption

from payments for housing vacations

and payment of schooling for children?

So this has always been a little tricky.

I mean, the Supreme Court is an independent branch.

It is not supposed to be subject to oversight

in quite the same ways that maybe lower courts might be

or the executive branch agencies.

Historically the way this has worked

is there has been a healthy, but sometimes heated,

back and forth between the political branches

and the Supreme Court.

Congress controls the Supreme Court's budget,

Congress controls the Supreme Court's docket,

and those have been levers

that historically Congress has pulled

as a way of pushing on the justices to behave better.

One of the things that has really happened

in the last 25 or 30 years that has gotten us

to where we are today with the Supreme Court

is Congress has mostly stopped pulling those levers.

And so when we talk about problems

with the current Supreme Court,

when we talk about opportunities

for reform of the current Supreme Court,

I like to start with the accountability question.

How can Congress impose more accountability on the justices

without interfering with judicial independence?

Maybe part of that starts

with an inspector general within the judicial branch,

someone who could supervise

whether the justices are complying with the relevant ethics

and financial disclosure rules.

Maybe it starts with getting back into the norm

of having the justices testify before Congress,

something that used to happen with somewhat more regularity.

Whatever you think the specific answer is though,

I think a big part of how we've gotten to where we are today

with the Supreme Court is we have a court that is not

and does not think it ought to be accountable

to the other branches the way that was true

for most of American history.

Well, I think that's it.

I've tried to answer all your questions.

Hope you've liked the answers.

Thanks for joining us. Until next time.

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