The Founding Era & the Idea of America

I have always needed clarification about how the Supreme Court operates, but watching these videos and articles has helped me understand it much more. I had a lot of incorrect information about the Supreme Court and thought they only worked sometimes. The most important takeaway about the Supreme Court is that they are all overqualified and make hard decisions every day. I learned that one of the most critical pieces of information about the Supreme Court is that they take in thousands of petitions each year to make decisions on. If the Justice disagrees, there could be eighty pages of notes just for one case. The video taught me that Presidents elect Chief Justices. I did not know that anyone could send in a petition, which could be for anything involving the law. I learned that before Warren's pro-civil rights decisions, they denied citizenship to enslaved African Americans in 1857, Dred Scott v. Sandford, and kept state segregation laws in 1896 (Plessy v. Ferguson). There was a ruling called Engel v. Vitale, and it was about leading prayer over the school's loudspeaker. I never thought about simple petitions like that and how many had to come through the Supreme Court that feels regular to us today. Another interesting fact I learned from that article was that there used to be five to ten seats on the Supreme Court, but in 1869 there was a set number of nine. I learned about William Howard Taft and how he was the only person to serve as President and Supreme Chief Justice. I didn't even know that you could do that.

Something surprising to me in the article and video was that United States v. Windsor, which means that the government can not deny benefits to same-sex couples, came before Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized all same-sex marriage in the United States. That means that just because a couple was the same sex, people would deny them the same rights as everyone else; I can not even think of a world like that, even though I know minority groups have been discriminated against since the beginning of The United States of America. Another thing that surprised me about the Supreme Court is that Roe v. Wade (1973), which ruled that women have a right to an abortion during the first two trimesters, was overturned in June 2022. Even though I already knew this, it still surprises me, and I can not believe that we want backward women's rights. Lastly, the video taught me that there is no "inside story" to a court. Everything is open to the public. Many people, including me, think that the court hides secrets or does secret things behind the scenes, but in the video, I learned that everything they have to do is printed to the press.

Overall, I enjoyed learning about the Supreme Court because I needed to be educated on it. I learned many things, from the basics to more complicated things, that most Americans need to learn. It gave me a broad overview of the inner workings of the Supreme Court.