Hey y'all, it's Beth here for a Pantsuit Primer on the Supreme Court.

You are a new Pantsuit College ExListener. Welcome and thank you for joining us.

Our primer episodes we put out sporadically to sort of level set

before we get into a more in-depth opinion discussion of a topic.

So here in a primer, I intend to spend about 15 minutes with you just talking about the Supreme Court

and leave my opinion at the door as much as I can. Now that being said, I'm not an expert on

anything and I'm a human full of biases. So they may come through, but I'll do my best to keep

this just about the facts. Okay, so we'll kind of go back to civics class for a minute on the

Supreme Court. As you know, the Supreme Court consists of a Chief Justice and Associate

Justices. What you might not know is that we have nine total justices by statute, not under

the Constitution. Congress has the power to determine the number of Associate Justices.

So right now Congress has done that through 28 USC Section 1, but Congress could change its

mind at some point. The power to nominate justices rest in the President under Article 3 Section 1

of the Constitution. The President has to seek the Senate's advice and consent, which we'll talk

more about in just a moment. The Constitution also says that Supreme Court Justices will stay in

office during periods of good behavior and that their compensation can't be reduced while they're

in office. Supreme Court only has original jurisdiction, meaning that the matter can be filed in

the first instance in the Supreme Court for cases impacting ambassadors, public ministers, and

consuls. There's also an exception for when a state shall be party to the action. That's a little

bit of a rabbit hole that we won't go down in this primer. More often, the Supreme Court exercises

a pellet jurisdiction, meaning a case has already been heard in a lower court and the Supreme Court

is hearing it as the final arbiter of the matter. There are two types of jurisdiction that federal

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