#9 How the Supreme Court Actually Works
Virginia votes in sixteen days on one question. If it passes, Democrats go from six congressional seats to ten. In one state. In one vote. That's four additional seats that directly affect who controls the House of Representatives.
Most people outside Virginia don't know this is happening.
Tonight --- a military alliance that is cracking. A court system most people can't explain. And a ballot measure in one state that could change who controls Congress before the midterms even happen.
NATO was formed in 1949.
World War II had just ended. Sixty million dead. Europe in ruins. The Soviet Union was expanding west. The United States, Canada, Britain, France and eight other countries signed a treaty in Washington. An attack on one is an attack on all. Article 5. That's the foundation. If the Soviet Union rolls tanks into West Germany every member of NATO goes to war.
The Cold War lasted 45 years. NATO held. The Soviets never crossed the line.
The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. NATO did not disband. It expanded. Fourteen more countries joined between 1999 and 2020. The alliance built to stop the Soviet Union kept growing after the Soviet Union was gone. And through all of it the United States has been the primary funder of the whole operation.
Here are the defense spending numbers.
The NATO target --- the number every member is supposed to hit --- is 2 percent of GDP. In 2024 only 23 of 32 members hit it. Germany spent 2.1 percent. France spent 2.1 percent. Italy spent 1.5 percent. Spain spent 1.3 percent. The United States spent 3.5 percent.
America has approximately 100,000 troops permanently stationed in Europe. American bases. American equipment. American taxpayers funding the forward defense of a continent whose combined economies are larger than America's.
In raw dollar terms the United States spends more on defense than the next ten NATO countries combined. America's defense budget is over 800 billion dollars a year. The entire rest of NATO combined spends roughly 400 billion. This is not a partnership of equals. America pays the majority of the bill.
Here's what NATO members did during Operation Epic Fury.
Spain blocked US military aircraft from transiting its airspace during combat operations. A NATO ally. A country that spends 1.3 percent of its GDP on defense --- less than half the NATO target --- blocked American military aircraft during an active war.
Italy blocked US military planes from landing at an Italian base.
France blocked American weapons transfers from going through French airspace.
Britain --- the country that has stood with the United States in every major conflict since World War II --- blocked offensive base use and raised public questions about whether American operations were legal.
Macron toured Asia calling the military option to reopen the Strait of Hormuz unrealistic. On the same day a French container ship transited the Strait.
These are NATO treaty allies.
Here's what the other allies did.
Poland spent 4 percent of GDP on defense in 2024. More than the United States. Poland is building the largest land army in Europe --- 300,000 active and reserve personnel. The Baltic states --- Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania --- all hit the NATO target. They are building border fortifications and training civilian defense forces. Romania opened its bases without being asked.
These are countries that spent decades under Soviet occupation. They know what losing looks like. They show up.
Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni flew to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE unannounced --- the first EU leader to visit the Gulf since the Iran war started. She went to show support for countries taking Iranian missile strikes and to lock in energy security for Italy. While France was calling the military option unrealistic, Meloni was on the ground with the countries actually getting hit.
Ukraine --- a non-NATO country fighting its own war against Russia --- sent more than 200 counter-drone specialists to Gulf states including Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and Kuwait. Ukraine signed defense agreements with Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Zelensky visited the Middle East during an active war to offer Ukraine's expertise fighting Iranian-made drones.
That is a non-member doing more to support American allies in this conflict than several actual NATO members.
Trump told the Daily Telegraph he is strongly considering pulling the United States out of NATO entirely. He called it a paper tiger. Rubio said the alliance will be reexamined after the war. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte flew to Washington and had multiple conversations with Trump in a single week.
Without the United States, NATO's collective defense capability collapses. America provides the nuclear umbrella. The logistics. The satellite systems. The advanced weapons technology. The bulk of the combat power. European militaries are structured around the assumption that America fills the gaps. Without America those gaps don't get filled quickly.
Germany's military has been deliberately underfunded for decades. Britain's is a fraction of what it was in the Cold War. France has nuclear weapons and a capable expeditionary force but not the scale to anchor a continent's defense.
Russia watches this debate. China watches this debate. The value of an alliance is in the credibility of the guarantee. Once the credibility is in question the deterrent weakens.
Article 5 says an attack on one is an attack on all.
During an American military operation Spain blocked airspace, France blocked weapons transfers, Britain restricted base use, and Italy blocked planes from landing.
Poland spent more than America. The Baltics built fortifications. Romania opened its bases. Meloni flew to the Gulf. Ukraine sent 200 specialists to help.
The list of countries that showed up is not the same as the founding member list of NATO. That gap is what this war revealed.
The countries that showed up --- Poland, the Baltics, Romania, Italy, Ukraine, the Gulf states --- are countries that have lived close to real threat. Countries that have had neighbors try to erase them. Countries that understand security is not guaranteed and the price of an alliance is actually showing up.
The countries that didn't show up have spent 75 years living under the American security guarantee without paying the full cost of it. Two generations of politicians who have never had to make a hard choice about military force because America made those choices for them.
Trump calling NATO a paper tiger is not wrong on the facts. An alliance where one member pays the majority of the bill and several members actively obstruct that member's military operations during a war is not functioning as an alliance. It is a protection arrangement where only one side pays.
What happens to NATO after this war --- its structure, its membership, its commitments, America's role in it --- will be one of the most consequential foreign policy debates of the next decade. This war already changed the answer.
Here's the historical context that matters.
NATO has expanded from 12 founding members to 32 members. Every expansion brought new obligations --- Article 5 guarantees for every new member. The alliance that was designed to defend Western Europe from Soviet invasion now includes countries on Russia's border, countries in the Balkans, and countries whose defense capabilities are minimal at best.
Trump is not the first American president to raise questions about NATO burden sharing. Obama raised it. Bush raised it. Every administration going back decades has complained about European countries not spending enough on their own defense. The difference is that this administration is raising it during an active military conflict where NATO allies are actively obstructing American operations. That changes the conversation from a diplomatic complaint to a fundamental question about what the alliance is for.
The 2 percent GDP target was set at a NATO summit in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea. Most members agreed to hit it by 2024. It's 2026 and several major members are still below it. Spain is at 1.3 percent. Italy is at 1.5 percent. These are not poor countries. These are major European economies that have chosen to spend less on their own defense because they have counted on America to fill the gap.
That calculation may be changing. Not because America is abandoning its allies. But because the allies that show up are going to get a different level of attention and investment than the ones that don't.
Most Americans know three things about the Supreme Court. Nine justices. Life terms. Black robes.
That's about it.
The most powerful court in the country --- the institution with final say on every major constitutional question --- and most people cannot explain how it operates beyond those three facts. How cases get there. What happens during arguments. How decisions actually get made. Why a case that goes before the court for six hours can take six months to produce a decision.
Here's how it works.
The Supreme Court doesn't have to take any case. It is not a court of automatic appeal. If you lose in a federal appeals court you can ask the Supreme Court to hear it. That request is called a petition for certiorari. Certiorari is a Latin word that means to be informed. You are asking the court to be informed about your case.
The court receives between 7,000 and 8,000 petitions every year. They take approximately 60 to 80. That is about one percent. The odds of the Supreme Court agreeing to hear your case are roughly the same as getting accepted to Harvard.
The most common reason they take a case is a circuit split. Two or more federal appeals courts have ruled differently on the same legal question. The Supreme Court steps in to settle it. The country needs one answer not different answers depending on what state you live in. The birthright citizenship case that went before the court on April 2 is a current example. Lower courts were ruling differently on Trump's executive order and the Supreme Court needed to provide one definitive answer.
They also take cases involving major constitutional questions, cases where the federal government is a party, and cases where they believe the lower court made a significant error.
Once the court agrees to hear a case both sides submit written briefs. Detailed legal arguments sometimes running hundreds of pages. Other parties who have an interest in the outcome can submit amicus curiae briefs --- friend of the court briefs. Major corporations, advocacy groups, former government officials, even foreign governments sometimes file these to tell the court how a ruling might affect them.
Then comes oral argument.
Each side gets thirty minutes. That's it. One hour total for cases that may have been litigating for years through the lower court system. A case that involved hundreds of hours in federal district court gets thirty minutes per side at the Supreme Court.
And those thirty minutes are not a presentation. The justices interrupt constantly. From the moment an attorney starts speaking the justices can jump in with questions. Some attorneys never get through their opening sentence before the first question hits. The attorneys are not lecturing the court. They are being interrogated by nine of the most legally trained minds in the country. The questions are pointed. Sometimes hostile. The attorneys have to answer on their feet.
Oral argument is not where the decision gets made. The justices have already read the briefs. They know the case. But it is where legal reasoning gets stress-tested in real time. A justice might ask a question not because they are uncertain but because they want to force the opposing attorney to admit something on the record. Or to expose a weakness they plan to write about later.
After oral argument the justices go into the Conference. The most private meeting in American government. No clerks. No staff. No recording devices. Nobody outside the nine justices.
They sit in order of seniority. The Chief Justice speaks first. Then each associate justice in seniority order. Each one states their preliminary vote and reasoning. The junior justice --- the most recently confirmed --- sits closest to the door and is responsible for answering any knocks and delivering messages. That is the only outside contact during Conference.
After discussion the votes are tallied. If the Chief Justice is in the majority the Chief assigns who writes the majority opinion. If the Chief is in the minority the most senior justice in the majority assigns it. That assignment matters. The justice who writes the opinion shapes how the law is written --- the specific language, how broad or narrow the ruling is, what it covers and what it leaves open for future cases.
The assigned justice and their law clerks --- young attorneys fresh out of the country's top law schools --- draft the opinion. Every word matters. This is the law of the land. How broadly or narrowly the ruling is written affects every case that comes after it for decades.
The draft gets circulated to all nine justices. Justices who agree with the outcome but for different reasons can write concurring opinions. Justices who disagree write dissents. And here's something most people don't know --- votes can change during this process. A justice who voted one way in Conference can switch after reading the draft. Sometimes the dissent is persuasive enough to pull votes away. Sometimes the majority opinion gets weakened trying to hold a wavering vote.
The court is handling dozens of cases simultaneously throughout the term. They hear arguments in batches and are writing opinions on multiple cases at once. The most controversial and complicated cases tend to come last. That's why the major decisions always come in late June. The court is racing to finish everything before the term ends.
The Shadow Docket. Almost nobody knows about this.
The normal process --- petitions, briefs, arguments, Conference, months of deliberation --- that's the main docket. The Shadow Docket is emergency applications that bypass the entire normal process.
When a lower court issues a ruling that one side believes is causing immediate damage they can go directly to the Supreme Court on an emergency basis. Ask the court to pause the lower court ruling while the case works through the system. These applications go to a single justice first --- whoever is assigned to the federal circuit where the case originated. That single justice can grant an emergency stay alone or refer it to the full court.
The full court can rule on Shadow Docket requests in hours or days. Sometimes with no public explanation at all. No oral argument. No full briefing in the traditional sense. No written opinion explaining the reasoning. Just a one or two line order that affects millions of people.
Trump has used this repeatedly in his second term. Federal courts blocked his executive orders on birthright citizenship, deportations and funding freezes. The administration went directly to the Supreme Court for emergency relief. The court has granted some of those requests and denied others --- often without saying which justices voted which way or why.
One last thing. Dissents.
When a justice loses --- when their side doesn't have the votes --- they can write a dissent. A dissent is not just a complaint. It is sometimes a message to the future.
Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote a lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. That was the case that upheld racial segregation --- separate but equal. Every other justice agreed with the ruling. Harlan wrote alone that the Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
Fifty-eight years later in 1954 Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy. The language the court used was almost exactly what Harlan had written in his dissent half a century earlier.
The majority opinion is the law today. The dissent is sometimes the law of tomorrow.
The birthright citizenship decision comes in late June or early July. Read the dissents too.
One more thing worth understanding about the court that most people don't know.
The Supreme Court is not in session year-round. The term runs from the first Monday in October through late June or early July. Arguments are heard from October through April in roughly two-week argument sessions followed by recesses. During the recesses justices are writing opinions and reviewing briefs for upcoming cases.
The justices do not all sit in Washington throughout the year. They have their own offices and clerks in their home cities. They communicate through their clerks and by circulating drafts. A lot of the negotiation over language and reasoning happens through written memos between chambers. It is a much more distributed process than most people imagine.
The court also decides many cases with no argument at all. Summary dispositions --- where the court reverses or affirms a lower court decision without hearing argument --- happen regularly. If the lower court ruling clearly contradicts existing Supreme Court precedent the court can simply say so without going through the full process.
What the court does not do is issue advisory opinions. They can only rule on actual cases and controversies. You cannot ask the Supreme Court what would happen if a law were passed. You cannot ask them to evaluate a hypothetical. There must be a real plaintiff with a real injury before the court can rule. That limit keeps the court from becoming a political advisory body --- though the line gets tested regularly.
The nine justices serve until they die, retire, or are removed through impeachment. No mandatory retirement age. No term limits. A justice confirmed at 50 could serve for 30 years or more. The confirmation of a single justice can shape constitutional law for a generation. That is why confirmation hearings have become what they have become. Both sides understand the stakes.
Virginia votes April 21 on whether to let the Democratic-controlled state legislature redraw the congressional map from six Democratic seats to ten out of eleven.
By the time this episode reaches you that vote may already be done. The result and what it means goes in the next episode. Tonight is the argument --- because the argument matters regardless of how the vote goes.
The Democratic argument is this. Texas redistricted in the middle of the decade. Republicans drew maps that gave their party more congressional seats. Virginia is the response.
Here are the facts on Texas.
Texas redistricted through its state legislature. In Texas the legislature has always had that power. It's been that way for decades. Republicans used the legal authority they had. No referendum required. No constitutional amendment needed. No change to the process. Texas followed its own rules.
Here are the facts on Virginia.
In 2020 Virginia voters passed a constitutional amendment by a wide margin. They took redistricting power away from the state legislature and gave it to a bipartisan commission. Eight legislators and eight citizens. Equal representation from both parties. The goal was to stop politicians from drawing maps that guaranteed their own party's victory. The people of Virginia voted for that. They chose it deliberately.
So when Virginia Democrats say they are responding to Texas --- that comparison doesn't hold. Texas used the power it already had. Virginia's voters specifically eliminated that power six years ago. Texas did not change its rules to redistrict. Virginia already changed its rules to prevent redistricting by politicians. These are not the same situation.
Here's the map Democrats drew and Governor Spanberger signed into law on February 20, 2026.
Virginia has eleven congressional seats. Current split: six Democratic, five Republican. In the last presidential election Virginia went Democratic by roughly six points. It is a competitive state.
The new map projects ten Democratic seats and one Republican seat. Ten to one. In a state that split 53 to 47.
If representation is supposed to reflect actual votes --- if a state where Democrats get 53 percent of the vote should get something close to 53 percent of the seats --- then a 10-1 map is not proportional. Democrats would get 91 percent of the congressional seats with 53 percent of the votes.
Governor Spanberger said in 2020 that gerrymandering is detrimental to democracy. She signed the 10-1 map into law in 2026.
The Democratic response to that is that Republicans have been gerrymandering in Texas, North Carolina and Georgia for years. The current House majority exists partly because Republican-drawn maps gave Republicans more seats than their raw vote totals would justify. Democrats are simply using the same tools.
That has factual basis. Republican-drawn maps have in some cases produced delegations that lean more Republican than the underlying vote share suggests.
California is the clearest current example from the other direction. California votes roughly 45 percent Republican in recent elections. California has 52 congressional seats. Under proportional representation California Republicans should have somewhere around 23 seats. They have a fraction of that. That is not representation. It is the same problem Virginia's 10-1 map would create --- just for a different party in a different state.
The answer to gerrymandering is not more gerrymandering. Virginia voters said that in 2020 when they created the bipartisan commission. On April 21 they decide if they meant it.
Here's the ballot question as written.
Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia's standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?
Restore fairness. That is the language on the ballot for a map that goes from six to ten seats in a near-evenly split state. The ballot language was written by Democratic members of the House of Delegates.
A Virginia judge ruled in January that the amendment process was unlawful because Democrats cut procedural corners in their rush to get it on the ballot. The Virginia Supreme Court overruled that and allowed the referendum to proceed --- but said remaining legal challenges would be resolved after the election. So voters may approve this on April 21 and the Virginia Supreme Court could still strike it down afterward.
The campaign supporting a yes vote has spent or reserved 17 million dollars in advertising through April 21. Barack Obama recorded ads. Hakeem Jeffries put money in. Soros-connected groups donated. National Democratic party groups are treating this as a priority investment.
The campaign opposing it has spent approximately one million dollars. Seventeen to one in advertising.
It's a special election. One question. Low turnout. Not a primary. Not a general election. A standalone April vote that most Virginians don't know is happening.
The broader question Virginia is really deciding is this. In 2020 the voters took redistricting away from politicians because politicians use it to entrench themselves. That was the whole point of the reform. Six years later Democratic politicians are asking those same voters to give that power back --- temporarily --- so Democratic politicians can draw a map that gives Democrats ten out of eleven congressional seats.
Texas followed its rules. Virginia already changed its rules to prevent this. Those are different situations and the Democratic argument that they are equivalent does not hold up to the facts.
Whether you think the answer to Republican gerrymandering is Democratic gerrymandering or whether you think the answer is independent commissions --- Virginia voters made a choice in 2020. On April 21 they decide if they still stand behind it.
The result goes in the next episode.
AND THATS IT.
Three stories tonight.
NATO --- the alliance was built on a promise. An attack on one is an attack on all. Spain blocked airspace. France blocked weapons. Britain restricted bases. Italy blocked planes from landing. Poland spent more than America. The Baltics built fortifications. Meloni flew to the Gulf. Ukraine sent specialists. The map of real American allies doesn't look like the one hanging in Brussels.
The Supreme Court --- nine justices, life terms, black robes. Now you know the rest. One percent of petitions accepted. Thirty minutes per side. Conference votes that can change after the fact. A Shadow Docket that moves in hours with no public explanation. And dissents that sometimes become the law fifty years later.
Virginia --- April 21. Texas followed its own rules. Virginia's voters already changed their own rules in 2020 to prevent this. Ten to one in a 53-47 state. Seventeen million against one million in advertising.
The result is in the next episode.
That is Everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff that nobody else will say, and the things that keep you going
I'm Brian Bullock of Starborn Studios find me on X at Everyone knws1 If this hits you, share it with somebody who needs to hear it. Subscribe. leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com. We're building something here and you're welcome to be part of it.
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