If you’re in any way keeping up with politics, you probably saw the Supreme Court’s March 4 decision to allow former president Donald Trump to remain on the ballot for this year’s presidential election, setting up a rematch of his 2020 faceoff with incumbent Joe Biden.
Regardless of your view of the outcome, if we start to examine what led up to the decision itself, there are a couple of things we can point to as primary causes for the Supreme Court voting as they have.
The most obvious of these is the fact that the court currently consists of a pretty hefty conservative majority, in SCOTUS terms; six conservative-leaning judges, compared to three more liberal-leaning.
Thus, it’s not overly surprising that the court would rule as they did, placing the onus on not restricting a person’s political freedom.
But why?
Not “Why did the court rule this way?” but “Why has the makeup of the court become what it is?”
It’s fair to say that this iteration of the Supreme Court has been in the public eye more often than in its previous variations, with significant rulings on hot-button social issues such as abortion rights and the legality of affirmative action programs at a college level.
These rulings have largely been made possible by the court’s conservative majority, three of whom were appointed during Trump’s presidency.
You’d be forgiven for not realizing the significance of this, given that many people aren’t familiar with the nomination process for Supreme Court justices.
To sum it up, when one of the nine vacancies on the bench opens after a judge retires or dies, the president at the time is responsible for selecting a candidate to fill the spot, who then needs to be confirmed by a majority in the Senate.
Most presidents will only have two candidates successfully make it to the bench in their term; before Trump, the last president who successfully nominated three justices was Ronald Reagan in the 1980s over the course of an eight -year term.
For Trump to have gotten the chance to nominate three justices in four years is the result of a loophole in the United States Senate process known as the filibuster.
Describing what a filibuster is sounds almost cartoonish.
It’s effectively a loophole in the Senate rules that allows senators to speak for unlimited lengths of time in order to waste time.
This is useful if a vote has a set deadline which it needs to happen by.
A senator can stand up and talk until the deadline has passed, thus stopping the vote from ever taking place.
In the context of the Supreme Court, a filibuster has made an appearance on a number of occasions, most recently during the presidency of Barack Obama, where current Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, employed a filibuster to deny Obama the ability to appoint his choice for a Supreme Court vacancy.
This successfully blocked the vote from happening until after Obama’s term in office had expired.
As a result of this, the responsibility fell to Trump, who took the opportunity to appoint conservative Neil Gorusch to the bench.
Without this nomination, it’s possible the court would never have gained the significant partisan majority we see today, and may even not voted the way they have on some of their most divisive decisions.
For the Supreme Court, and therefore legislation that impacts so much of our country, to be impactable by such a minor political loophole is, frankly, ridiculous.
The Senate agreed, and in 2020 voted to outlaw the filibuster with regards to Supreme Court nominations.
But, the next time you wonder why the Supreme Court voted the way it did?
You can blame the filibuster.