yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The Court in Action | AP US Government and Politics | Khan Academy


4m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Of the three branches of the US government, the judicial branch is the one that is least bound by public opinion. Supreme Court justices aren't elected; they're appointed, and they serve for life or until they decide to retire. Usually, justices serve on the court for many years after the end of the term of the president who appointed them. One Justice, William O. Douglas, was appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939 and didn't retire until 1975 when Gerald Ford was president. Can you imagine how much changed during his tenure on the court?

The framers designed things this way so that the Supreme Court justices can be independent, consulting the Constitution and precedent to decide whether laws and executive actions are permissible without having to worry about keeping the public happy to get reelected. But this also means that it's not unusual that the Supreme Court makes decisions that the public, the president, or members of Congress don't like. Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 is a good example. White Southerners resisted the ruling, refusing to integrate segregated public schools. Although it wasn't popular with the majority population of the states that it most affected, the ruling protecting minority rights in Brown v. Board was made possible by the independence of the judiciary.

In that case, the Supreme Court had the backing of presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, who sent federal troops into the South to enforce the ruling. Even though the court is independent, it's still important that it maintains its legitimacy in the eyes of the public so that citizens believe that the court is impartial and that it's possible to challenge the other branches through the actions of the court. To maintain its legitimacy, justices on the court are careful not to give the appearance of favoring one political party over another by ruling too often for or against one party's policies.

But what happens when the president or Congress doesn't support the Supreme Court's rulings? What measures can they take to affect the court's decisions? There are three main ways that we'll talk about in this video: future appointments to the court, changing the court's jurisdiction, and refusing to implement the court's decisions.

One of the ways that presidents can influence the court is by appointing justices. Presidents tend to nominate Supreme Court justices who share their interpretation of the Constitution, so their appointments change the ideological composition of the court. For example, President Richard Nixon appointed four justices to the Supreme Court that altered the court's ideological leaning. He assured a transition from a liberal court under Chief Justice Earl Warren to a more conservative court under Chief Justice Warren Burger.

Congress can also influence the court by changing the number of justices. Today, we accept that there are nine justices on the Supreme Court, but Article 3 of the Constitution doesn't actually specify how many justices are on the court. Over time, there have been as few as six and as many as ten. There have been nine since Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1861, limiting seats in the 1860s. Then, in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt proposed adding more seats to the Supreme Court so that its ideological balance would move in favor of his New Deal legislation.

So, although the number of justices on the court hasn't actually changed in 150 years, Congress does retain the power to adjust that number. Another way that Congress can influence the Supreme Court is by changing its jurisdiction, or the field of authority that it has to hear and decide cases. There are two places in the Constitution that say that Congress can do this: Article 1, Section 8, which says that Congress has the power to constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court; and Article 3, Section 1, which says that judicial power shall be vested in the Supreme Court and such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

So, Congress may add new federal courts by setting up an existing district or subtract them by combining districts. Congress may also pass legislation stripping the Supreme Court's jurisdiction to hear certain types of cases on appeal. Some recent examples of Congress attempting to strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction concern the detainees at Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. In the mid-2000s, the detainees petitioned the Supreme Court to review whether their detention was legal, and Congress passed two laws stripping detainees of the right to petition courts for review. The Supreme Court overturned both of those laws.

The last way that the other branches can push back against a court decision is by refusing to implement it or by doing as little as possible to implement it. Remember, the court itself has no enforcement power; it has to rely on the executive branch to enforce its rulings. So, what happens when the president disagrees with a ruling? In most cases, presidents enforce the Supreme Court's rulings, whether they like them or not, seeing it as part of their duty to uphold the government.

But in rare cases, a president might choose not to enforce a court ruling, especially if their party controls Congress. An early example of this was in 1808 when the Supreme Court ruled Thomas Jefferson's embargo act—the one with the famous “Oh grab me!” cartoon—was unconstitutional. Jefferson instructed customs agents to keep on enforcing the embargo, and they did so.

The important takeaway here is that even though the Supreme Court determines the law of the land, the system of checks and balances still applies to it. Congress and the president have several ways to influence the court's power, present and future.

More Articles

View All
Don’t Buy A Home In 2023 (The Worst Drop On Record)
What’s up Grandma? It’s guys here. So, 2023 is already off to an interesting start. Movie fans can now sue over a misleading trailer. California is cracking down on fake parking tickets, and we’ve just seen the worst housing decline on record coming in at…
Chandragupta, Ashoka and the Maurya Empire | World History | Khan Academy
We’re now going to talk about the Moria Empire, which is not just one of the greatest empires in Indian history, and really the first truly great Empire. It’s also one of the great empires of world history. Just for a little bit of context, we can see whe…
How Do Cartels Get Their Weapons? | Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller
[engine revving] [suspenseful music] MARIANA VAN ZELLER: In my quest to expose how American guns are trafficked throughout Mexico, I never expected to be headed out to sea. But as we move deeper into the waters, these smugglers break down their operation…
Introduction to infinite limits | Limits and continuity | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
In a previous video, we’ve looked at these graphs. This is y equal to one over x squared. This is y is equal to one over x. We explored what’s the limit as x approaches zero in either of those scenarios. In this left scenario, we saw as x becomes less an…
Making a Live Trap | Live Free or Die
Thorne’s girlfriend Delia’s counting on him to make sure they stay stocked up on meat, but he’s new to trapping and still doesn’t have a handle on the habits of all the wildlife in the area. “Now I’m gonna actually make a live trap. It’s kind of like a p…
Return from the Okavango in 360 - Ep. 4 | The Okavango Experience
This is a place filled with magic. Everything has to have a reason: the movement of the grass, the core of an animal, the call of a bird. Everything, we’re connected to all of it, and that is the most alive we can ever be. This is a sanctuary for these in…