SCOTUS History Article

I just read this article by History.com about the history of the Supreme Court (https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/supreme-court-facts). Throughout my entire life, the federal government has been a rather static yet powerful institution. It is hard to imagine that it has ever been anything else, and that the three branches were created exactly as they are now by the founding fathers. I thought the only things that changed about them were their members. However, the Judicial branch in particular has had a rather turbulent history.

First off, I always thought the Supreme Court had 9 justices because an odd number just made sense, but it actually began with 6 justices as stated in this quote from the article, “Though the first court comprised of six justices, Congress altered the number of Supreme Court seats — from a low of five to a high of 10 — six times over the years. In 1869, Congress set the number of seats to nine, where it has remained until today. As of June 2022, 115 Justices have served on the Supreme Court.” This truly shocked me. Six changes is quite a lot and the fact that congress settled on such a large range of five to ten is also odd because both Congress and the President seem to really rush getting a new justice to fill the seat of the last one. If the number of justices can range so much, then it seems that there should not be so much pressure, other than the president getting in someone they trust before the end of their term.

Another interesting interaction with the presidency that the supreme court has is that the chief justice oversees impeachment trials. This seems problematic to me as the same president that nominates the chief justice could end up being on trial presiding under them, which would be a clear conflict of interest, in my opinion. Another interesting thing I learned about the chief justice was that, “In cases where the chief justice is a member of the majority opinion, the justice has the authority to assign who will write the court’s opinion.” Is this still true? I could not find a clear answer online. After reading this in the article, it felt like a fact that should be pretty obvious but I have never really thought about the small details of how the supreme court deals out rulings. This article definitely made me stop and think about those details for the first time.

This article also mentioned several notable chief justices, who had very interesting facts about them. Most notably was Chief justice John Marshall who revolutionized the Supreme Court during the case Marbury v Madison (1803) when he created the power of “judicial review” for the Supreme Court to deem what laws, orders, and actions of the other two branches are constitutional. These days, this power seems so integral to the Supreme Court that I thought the court always held this power. Fun fact - he also held the longest ever term for a chief justice at 34 years. Two other chief justices who stuck out to me were Earl Warren, who created the Miranda rights in the case of Miranda v Arizona (1966), and William Howard Taft, who served as both a president (1909-1913) and a chief justice (1921-1930). This was great for reminding me just how interesting of a history the United States has, despite its relatively short existence, and revitalizing my interest in studying that history.