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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, one thing we like is a good mystery. Sometimes about really big things, but most times, the little mysteries are the best.
Our lost and found is currently filled with pants. I don't know, I've never seen this happen.
Wait, this is true?
This is true. Mysteries of every size, each week. This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Rund. As the clock ticks down to the close of the Supreme Court's 2025-2026 term, and we await the justices to hand down nearly two dozen more rulings by early July, the most anticipated of which involve birthright citizenship, the counting of mail-in ballots, the president's power to remove any official, and state bans on female transgender athletes.
We thought it would be helpful to share a ThruLine episode from our archives that tells the story of the Supreme Court, how it evolved from the weakest branch of government to the powerhouse arbiter it is today.
There it is with the 2-0 pitch.
And this ball smashed high and deep to center field.
It is won!
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Chapter 2: What significant cases are expected in the Supreme Court's 2025-26 term?
One person throws the ball, the other tries to hit it. And the person behind the plate, behind the catcher, the person calling the strikes are balls. Two balls and a strike. That's the umpire. The arbiter of justice. What he says goes. No questions asked. Well, most of the time. But even when people don't like the ump's call, they have to live with it or get thrown out.
That's just the way the game was set up.
But this isn't an episode about baseball.
Justice Ginsburg, will you raise your right hand and repeat after me?
This is an episode about the Supreme Court.
I, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Which some people like to think of as America's umpire.
Judges are like umpires.
calling the shots for the country, no questions asked, right?
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Chapter 3: How did the Supreme Court evolve from the weakest to the most powerful branch of government?
They did not have separate offices the way that we think of today. And that was only when they were in Washington, D.C., where they spent just some of the year. The rest of the time, they were doing this thing called riding circuit, meaning they would basically travel around the country
A judge would, in fact, yes, ride around horseback or really in a carriage and go from town to town where the circuits were held. And they would preside over trials. Keep in mind, there wasn't a vast web of federal judges around the country that could filter some of these cases for the court like there is today. So the Supreme Court justices rode around and handled things themselves.
At the end of the day, the justices would take off their judge hat. They would go and stay in their boarding houses. These boarding houses were typically shared with the lawyers who were trying the cases. Getting to know the town, spending time with the political folks who are around. Lots of the lawyers who tried cases in front of the circuit courts tended to be state legislators.
Everything's a lot looser than it subsequently becomes. At this time, politics and the Supreme Court were very intertwined. The justices saw no separation between the two. They viewed themselves as perfectly capable of participating in political debate as judges.
In fact, the court was so political that many of the justices just saw their job as a stepping stone in their quest for political power. They didn't hang around that basement for very long, if you know what I mean. But some people, even then, had a different vision for the court. They wanted the court to be taken seriously, to reign supreme.
And over the next 200 years, that vision would slowly be realized. I'm Ramteen Arabzoui. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And on this episode, we're diving into the long, complicated political history of the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court of the United States. How did it become America's umpire?
And when did it get the final say on human rights, health care, and even who we choose as president? Hi, this is Ellie, and I'm calling from Washington, D.C., and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.
Every episode of It's Been a Minute, NPR's What's Happening in Culture podcast starts by asking three questions. Who? How? Why now? If the culture's asking it, we're talking about it. At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and indulge your cultural curiosity. Follow It's Been a Minute wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll break down the zeitgeisty topics that are filling your feed.
This week on Up First from NPR News, President Trump is at the G7 in France and is supposed to sign a peace deal with Iran. That deal, if it happens as planned, will have big effects on the global economy and more, and we will track the changes as they unfold. On a week of major geopolitical news, listen to Up First every morning on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chapter 4: What was the role of Chief Justice John Marshall in shaping the Supreme Court?
He is a big proponent of having unanimous opinions. He thought that that had the tendency to make the court seem more important. Marshall dreamt of a Supreme Court with national authority, a Supreme Court that gets to interpret the Constitution, basically be the umpire for the entire country. He believes in judicial supremacy.
which is much more what we accept today, the idea that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of constitutionality. This idea, judicial supremacy, gives the Supreme Court final say over what's constitutional and what's not. And then everybody has to do what they decide, the law of the land. But again, this was a dream. It's just not how things worked then.
But there was this other thing, a much more restricted power, that was on the table. Judicial review. So judicial review is the notion that in a case before it, the court can say whether a statute that is raised in the case is in fact constitutional and therefore enforceable. The court gets to decide what's constitutional in a case, but the ruling doesn't extend beyond that specific case.
So it's the law of the case, but not the law of the land. The whole idea of judicial review without judicial supremacy is that you have three co-equal branches, each with equal authority to interpret the Constitution. Remember, that was how the federal government was designed to work. No one branch was supreme over the others, so they could all keep each other in check.
Marshall himself was interested in having more of that supreme power for the court, but he also understood it was not possible. He operates in this world in which he knows he's a minority, especially when the Democratic Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are in power. Plus, there was some personal beef. Marshall and Jefferson were cousins. They famously did not like each other.
In 1803, the cousins, Chief Justice John Marshall and President Thomas Jefferson, met in court, going head-to-head in a case called Marbury v. Madison. Probably the most famous decision and sort of the beginning of most constitutional law experiences is Marbury v. Madison.
We won't get into all the details of the case, but in short, the Jefferson administration was being sued for refusing to acknowledge some of those midnight judges that John Adams had appointed right before leaving office. William Marbury was one of them.
He and the other appointees were able to take the case directly to the Supreme Court, thanks to a provision in a federal law that Congress had passed more than a decade earlier. And Marshall saw this as an opportunity. He sees this as a situation in which he needs to preserve the power of the court that had existed and try to grow it in opposition to the other branches of government.
Marshall wanted to flex his authority as the head of the judicial branch. But he knows if he actually tries to order Jefferson, Jefferson's going to ignore him. So that will make the court look weak. Remember, the court didn't have the power to enforce its decisions. No money, no army. It all depended on how much the other branches chose to respect its decisions.
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Chapter 5: How did the Dred Scott case impact the perception of the Supreme Court?
Dred Scott certainly hurts the court's credibility for a good generation. Takes them a while to rebuild credibility after that. When we come back, the Supreme Court fights to restore its legitimacy as a president challenges its power at every turn.
This is Jose Santana from Navajo, Connecticut, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.
I really love you guys. Thank you for bringing so much information to us.
Bye.
This week on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, we ask comedy legend Robert Smigel about the moment he first knew he was funny.
When I was like four or five, I could draw really well. So I could draw Fred Flintstone and Snoopy. And then probably a couple of years later, I started drawing them having sex. Listen to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
This week on Shortwave, with the price of jet fuel soaring, the hunt is on for other ways to power air travel sustainably.
We are working with companies that take post-anaerobic digested human sewage and turn that into jet fuel.
How scientists are considering every possibility, even poop, to power the future of air travel. This week on Shortwave, listen in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chapter 6: What were the consequences of the Supreme Court's decisions during the New Deal era?
In 1937, Roosevelt's second New Deal was upheld. Case after case came before the court, and they basically just greenlit everything. A minimum wage, Social Security, the right of workers to unionize. And not long after... One of the five justices who were the conservative majority holding this all back, Van De Vanter, retires in the middle of all this.
And Roosevelt is able quickly to replace him. So now he's got the law that he wants. The court has retreated. He's got the court that he wants. So he lets the court packing plant go. He doesn't need it. He's gotten what he needed. And in the next couple of years, the rest of them retire and he's able to appoint other justices.
So Roosevelt did get the court he wanted, just not in the way he expected.
From the time of the court packing plan onward, the court simply rubber stamps the federal government. Whatever the federal government does, the court is going to approve.
But the court's bid for judicial supremacy wasn't over just yet. Tucked away in one of the cases decided by this court was a footnote that said, We are reserving heightened judicial entanglement in a certain number of areas. They refer to discrete and insular minorities and the protection of individual rights. Individual rights. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
Nobody paid much attention to that footnote because in the 150 years before then, none of those issues had actually been major issues in constitutional law. So it'd be like me saying, I'm going to let you control the whole house, but I'm going to keep this corner over here. Like, fine, keep that corner. What do I care? To be clear, that corner was the civil rights corner.
And then what the Warren Court does is pick that up in ways that actually nobody had really thought would happen and runs with it. Takes those doctrines and turns them into major issues of constitutional law for the first time. When we come back, we enter the Warren Court era and the battle for judicial supremacy reaches a tipping point.
This is Dano from Phoenix, Arizona, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.
The fatal shooting of a teenager at a protest in Seattle has gone unsolved for six years.
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Chapter 7: How did the Warren Court change the landscape of civil rights in America?
So there's the famous line in it where Marshall says, It is emphatically the duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.
As we learned earlier in the episode, what that meant in 1803 was that the court could decide what the law is only in the case at hand. But in 1958, the court was asserting that it had carte blanche power, a decision in one case applied to everyone everywhere in the country. In other words, judicial supremacy. We set the floor and we set the ceiling.
Thing is, not everyone was bought into the idea of judicial supremacy yet. It's greeted with widespread skepticism because, remember, most of the people on the left had fought the earlier court battles. They were Roosevelt people. And the idea of judicial supremacy was anathema to their understanding.
How could they give final say power to a court that had stood in the way of so much legislation they believed in? But there is a new generation of rising liberals who, seeing an activist liberal court, like, love this. So they embrace the idea of judicial supremacy because they're looking at a court that's enabling them to do all sorts of things that they think are good and right and important.
I believe that we can and that we must restore integrity in government and the confidence of people in the integrity of their government.
This is the voice of Earl Warren. He was chief justice of the court during both Brown v. Board and Cooper v. Aaron, which marked the beginning of what would come to be known as the Warren Court era. And over the next decade, the 1960s, under his leadership, the court will expand its power like never before.
I think on this day many of us didn't realize just how important our movement was.
The real invader is integration.
Unless we integrate, we shall very quickly disintegrate.
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Chapter 8: What was the significance of the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade?
That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me, Ramteen Adablui, and... Thank you to Austin Horn, Travis Lux, Pranjali Shah, and Jess Berry for their voiceover work. Thanks also to Irene Noguchi, Julia Redpath, Yolanda Sangweni, Beth Donovan, Liana Simstrom, and Anya Grunman.
Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Navid Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. If you have an idea or like something on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. Thanks for listening.
NPR's newest podcast is where you can find NPR's biggest interviews. I'm Steve Inskeep. The program is called Newsmakers. We talk with some of the most powerful and influential people at this moment to put real questions to them and push for real answers. Follow Newsmakers on the NPR app or any podcast player, or you can watch on NPR's YouTube channel.
The most compelling global stories straight to your ears.
That's what we do at State of the World from NPR. Developments in Ukraine, Iran, with Ebola, but also how British beavers are fighting the effects of climate change.
So we said the beavers can do it probably a fraction of the cost, certainly more sustainably.
Listen to State of the World every weekday on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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