Post

The role of the judicial branch in general is to adjudicate legal cases, determine whether or not laws are being broken, assign punishments within the scope of the law and so on. The Supreme Court is different, though. If a case gets to the Supreme Court, they're not ruling on whether the law was broken. They're ruling on whether the law is valid. They make decisions on whether to uphold the law as Constitutional, or rule it unConstitutional and so invalid and without force.

And this is kind of weird, because the Constitution doesn't really explicitly give them this power. The first Supreme Court kind of made it up for themselves out of implications, interpretations, and flimsy Constitutional justifications, and then used it to rule that it was totally valid.

Supreme Court justices are appointed by the President, and confirmed or rejected by the Senate, and they serve for life (or until they resign... or it's theoretically possible to impeach them, but that's only happened once ever, back in 1805, and it wasn't successful). One of the most conservative justices, Antonin Scalia, recently kicked the bucket. The Republican-controlled Senate has been refusing to even hold hearings on whether to confirm or deny Obama's proposed replacement, trying instead to run out the clock on the Obama Presidency, in hopes that, in the upcoming elections, they retain control of the Senate, and get a Republican President who will give them a justice they find more palatable.