The Supremes
From The West Wing (Season 5, Episode 17)
Categories:
Run time: 2:29
Clip Description: The importance of a balanced Court; the extent to which politics influences Court picks. Should a President nominate two judges, even if one isn’t their choice, to get both confirmed? That’s the debate in The West Wing.
American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: The clip discusses how the Supreme Courts works within the government.
Possible Uses in Classroom: This clip is useful in discussions on the importance of keeping politics out of the judicial branch of government, as well as Supreme Court configuration.
Discussion Questions
- The premise of the deal is that one seat can be traded for another. That only makes sense if the Court’s composition is a political balance to be negotiated rather than a bench of people applying law. What theory of judging makes balance a virtue, what theory makes it a category error, and which of those theories do senators appear to act on during confirmation hearings, whatever they say at the microphone?
- Federal judges hold office during good behavior, which in practice means they choose when to leave. A justice who times a retirement so that a friendly president names the successor has made a political decision from a seat designed to be insulated from politics. Does life tenure still do the job it was meant to do, and would the most common reform proposal, staggered fixed terms of about eighteen years, reduce the politics or simply schedule them?
- Suppose you learned that a nominee will almost certainly rule your way on the issue you care most about and is otherwise a mediocre lawyer. Do you want that person confirmed? Answer honestly before you answer well, and then say what your answer implies about what confirmation hearings are actually for.
Assignment
Senate roll-call votes on Supreme Court confirmations are public on senate.gov. Pull the vote for the three most recently confirmed justices and for one justice confirmed in the 1990s, and count how many senators in each case voted against their own party’s position. Then write two pages accounting for the difference. The trap is that polarization is a label for the change, not an explanation of it: you need a mechanism, and you should say whether you think the cause sits with the nominees, the senators, the confirmation process, or the fact that the Court now decides questions that used to be settled elsewhere.
For AP Students
AP U.S. Government and Politics
Unit 2: Interactions Among Branches of Government
Topics: 2.8 The Judicial Branch; 2.9 The Role of the Judicial Branch; 2.11 Checks on the Judicial Branch
Skill: SCOTUS Application (2.B): explain how a required Supreme Court case relates to a foundational document
Anchors: Federalist No. 78; Marbury v. Madison (1803)
Staffers try to solve a single vacancy by pairing a liberal nomination with a conservative one. The scene puts judicial independence and the political appointment process in the same room, which is exactly the tension Federalist No. 78 sets out to resolve. Students get to watch that argument made out loud, by people who have something to gain from how it comes out.
Discussion questions
- Federalist No. 78 calls the judiciary the least dangerous branch, on the grounds that it commands neither the sword nor the purse. If that is right, why do senators fight this hard over one seat?
- Federal judges hold office during good behavior, which in practice means for as long as they choose to stay. Name one way life tenure protects a judge from politics, and one way it lets a justice make a political choice.
- A president appoints justices, and those justices later overturn a ruling the country had relied on for decades. Has the constitutional design worked or failed? Pick one and give a reason.
Short activity
Three-sentence concept application (15 minutes). Give students this scenario: a president nominates a justice whose views closely match the president’s own, and the Senate confirms along party lines. In three sentences, students must name the constitutional power each branch is exercising, explain one check the other branch holds over it, and explain one way the episode affects the legitimacy of the Court. Three sentences, three tasks, is the shape of the concept application question that opens the free-response section, and it is worth telling students so.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons.