hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history now we've been going through unit 2 of the ap government curriculum and in this video we're going to continue talking about the supreme court namely how unpopular or controversial decisions have led people to question the legitimacy of the court so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked then let's get to it so what we're trying to do in this video is the same thing we started in the last video explain how the exercise of judicial review in conjunction with life tenure can lead to the debate about the legitimacy of the supreme court's power then we're also going to aim to answer this explain how other branches of government can limit the supreme court's power so in order to get into this you need to understand two terms that describe the kind of decisions that the court hands down the first is judicial activism if a court is an activist court that means it acts to establish policy and in its deliberative work considers the broad effects of a decision on society now to call a court activist is usually not a compliment but rather a complaint it's like saying that the court is going beyond the constitution to establish the ideological will of the majority and that's not a conservative or a liberal thing justices of both ideologies have been accused of judicial activism and i'll give you an example of both the liberal warren court was accused of activism after the brown v board of education decision which led to the integration of schools this decision overturned the precedent of legal racial segregation and led many southern americans to question the legitimacy of the supreme court on the other hand the conservative roberts court was accused of activism after the citizens united vs fec decision which dealt with campaign finance and ultimately gave republican candidates an edge now the other term you need to know to describe the court is judicial restraint justices who adhere to this idea believe that judges are not appointed to make policy like that's the job of the legislature therefore a law should be struck down not in consideration of its effects on society but only to the degree that it violates the actual written word of the constitution those who fall into judicial restraint camp put a huge emphasis on precedent and the principle of starry decisions it would be very hard to find a court devoted to judicial restraint that also made a habit of overturning precedent set by former courts now for all the virtues of judicial restraint and its emphasis on the letter of the law this conviction has also created the occasion for a violation of civil rights as in the separate but equal doctrine established by plessy vs ferguson when justices operate under judicial restraint it could sometimes keep them from overturning precedents that need to be overturned okay now that we understand those two competing postures of the court let's have a look at some of the court's most controversial decisions and consider how those decisions led people to question the court's legitimacy first let's consider dred scott v sanford which was decided under the taney court in 1857 if you've already taken us history you may remember the compromise of 1820 which established that slavery could not exist in any territory above this line right here except in missouri and that compromise kept the slavery debate kind of in check for a while okay so dred scott was an enslaved man who was taken to live in the illinois and wisconsin territories where slavery was not permitted therefore scott sued for his freedom on the grounds that his enslavement was invalidated by living in free territory while the taney court decided that since enslaved people were not technically citizens then scott had no right to sue in federal court and then furthermore the court struck down the compromise of 1820 as unconstitutional on the reasoning that since enslaved people were considered property and the fifth amendment protects a person's property then any law that would deprive a person of his property was unconstitutional and in striking down the compromise of 1820 this decision effectively opened the entire nation to slavery and by the way this would be a case of judicial activism because as one of the dissenting justices pointed out to say that scott had no standing in court as a citizen had precisely no relationship to striking down the compromise of 1820. so anyway the outcome of this decision was massive and i cannot emphasize to you how important it was in the first 70 or 80 years of american history to keep the slavery issue balanced so that no region had an advantage over the other but this decision was a huge win for the slave states and all of a sudden abolitionists were furious because this group of unelected judges overturned a law that was keeping slavery confined to the south it wasn't just abolitionists like even northerners who cared nothing about the civil rights of enslaved black folks worried that the political and economic power of slave states would grow to consume them after this decision so the legitimacy of the supreme court's power was certainly brought into question after that decision okay another controversial decision was koromatsu via the united states in 1944. now if you know your dates you know that that decision was handed down during world war ii right after the japanese bombed pearl harbor effectively bringing the us into the war president roosevelt issued executive order 9066 which ordered americans of japanese descent to be gathered into internment camps on the reasoning that they might be involved in espionage for the japanese government now to be clear the japanese people were talking about were american citizens many of them not all of them but many of them were american citizens so by executive order roosevelt forcibly removed american citizens from their homes and put them in internment camps one of those citizens named fred koromatsu stood up and said uh last time i checked american citizens have fifth amendment rights which protect us from being imprisoned without a trial well the supreme court upheld the forced internment in a tragic example of judicial restraint the court had ruled in the previous year on another similar case called hirabayashi vi the united states and in that decision the court argued that the relocation of japanese american citizens and japanese immigrants was constitutional because in time of war residents having ethnic affiliations with an invading enemy may be a greater source of danger than those of a different ancestry okay now roe v wade is another very controversial decision that like the two i've already mentioned led some americans to question the legitimacy of the court's power however we're going to talk a lot more about that case in unit 3 so i'll leave it there for now but the last thing we need to discuss is how the other branches of government can check the decisions of the supreme court now it's really obvious how the court checks the other branches like it strikes down laws passed by the legislative branch or rules on the constitutionality of executive action but how in the world do the other branches check the court decisions well i'll give you five ways the first way the court can be checked by congress is when legislators pass laws that modify the impact of prior supreme court decisions for example in another video we talked about the decision united states v lopez the court struck down congress's gun-free school zones act because they deemed it unconstitutional and recall that the law prohibited guns on school property based on the commerce clause of the constitution and congress's power to regulate interstate commerce on that basis the court said it's a pretty big stretch and they struck down the law so in the same year congress amended that law to uphold the principle of keeping guns out of schools but made it clear how such a law related to the commerce clause the second way congress can check the court is through constitutional amendments so in response to the dred scott case which essentially opened all states to slavery congress passed the 13th amendment which banned slavery also there was a civil war but you know whatever the 13th amendment reversed the dred scott decision the third way congress can check the court is by passing legislation that impacts the court's jurisdiction now remember what i said in another video about the court's jurisdiction which is to say the scope of its power to hear cases the supreme court has both original and appellate jurisdiction congress can't touch the court's original jurisdiction but it can alter its appellate jurisdiction by restricting the kinds of cases the court can hear and there are also two ways that the president can check the court and the first is through judicial appointments i've talked about this already in this video and in the previous two so the short version is this that if a court hands down an unfavorable decision then the president can appoint justices that are likely to hand down different decisions when the occasion arises and the second way the president can check the judicial branch is by simply not enforcing the decision handed down this is a little sketchy but it has happened nonetheless probably the most famous occasion was when the court ruled that the removal of cherokee indians from georgia was unconstitutional president andrew jackson who was very much in favor of removal allegedly said john marshall has made his decision now let him enforce it and then he went ahead with the removal program anyway now as a history teacher i do feel compelled to add that the evidence that jackson actually said those words is a little shaky but still no one doubts that he could have said something very much like it okay that's what you need to know about unit 2 topics 10 through 11 for the ap government curriculum click right here to grab few packet 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