00:00Ever wondered what the Supreme Court of the United States had to do with the presidential elections?
00:05Hello, I'm Prerna Shanil and I'm standing next to the SCOTUS building here in Washington, D.C.
00:10Now, we're just a few days away from the elections. It's interesting to reflect upon the role
00:15Supreme Court justices play in creating a check and balance
00:18between the different branches of the government.
00:24We are one people, one family.
00:27We stand for freedom.
00:29The power to appoint the Supreme Court justices belong exclusively to the U.S.
00:34president with the majority vote approval of the Senate.
00:39I think that's one of the first differences and a very stark difference that I noticed when I
00:44started my studies here as opposed to India that the Supreme Court judges are elected by
00:50by the president, appointed by the president. And it was so, it's always been very strange to me
00:55that politicians can appoint judges and the judges can have this ideology or
01:02very clear allegiance to a particular party and then be elected.
01:07But after studying the law here and looking at the election season, it's obviously a very big
01:15issue because I think the last government, the government before this one, had an opportunity
01:21to appoint one of the largest number of judges that any governments have had in the recent past.
01:26And so they could influence the ideology of the Supreme Court and these are lifetime appointments.
01:34So once you have people belonging to a certain ideology on the bench, you can't remove them
01:41once the government changes anyway. So you've decided already how most things are going to be
01:48decided at the Supreme Court level and that is how we have judgments like overturning of Roe v. Wade.
01:56So I can see why it's a major issue even in this election because it determines for the rest of
02:02the Supreme Court's tenure how the decisions are going to come out. You already know what
02:06decisions are going to say. So I think that's why it's become more concerning and even though
02:11the system was working okay till now, it's been more concerning in the recent years.
02:16President Donald Trump appointed three conservative justices during his term
02:20which led to the court's dramatic swing to the right.
02:24Ada, why do you think Supreme Court has become such a driving force in the 2024 elections?
02:30I think it's become such a big issue in the US because the Supreme Court has been making a lot
02:36of decisions recently that are really out of step with the majority of what people in the US think.
02:43With the overturning of Roe v. Wade that was historically unpopular and even decisions that
02:51are not really as widely covered in the media like the overturning of the Chevron doctrine
02:57to quickly explain that it invalidates a portion of the law which is the foundation for a lot of
03:06regulation in the US and it's going to have a huge effect as it's applied throughout the legal
03:15system and there's a feeling I think that so the reason that these decisions have been able to be
03:24made is because there's a very organized effort by the Republican Party and conservatives to
03:30through the Federalist Society kind of pick people who they think would be judges that agree
03:37with their philosophy and just to have lists for all the conservative politicians once they get
03:44in office to be able to just pick someone off the list and put them into office and put them in a
03:50position to be quickly promoted and there's a very organized effort to do that within the Republican
03:57Party in a way that doesn't exist for the Democratic Party and I think there's a feeling
04:02that that organization and that strategy has allowed views that are not what the majority
04:13of people hold and are not even what most lawyers hold. That strategy has allowed a lot of
04:20decisions to come about that much of the legal community thinks are baseless and illogical.
04:29Do you think if Donald Trump comes to power or if Kamala Harris comes to power
04:35what is going to be the ratio of judges Republicans or Democrats in Supreme Court at this point?
04:43Well currently it's a 6-3 majority for conservatives on the court.
04:48I really I'm not I'm not sure what would happen. It all depends on the vacancies
04:54who decides to retire or who dies in office so I'm not really sure but
05:01Trump's appointments have certainly locked in a conservative majority for decades at least.
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