Nine Votes that Count

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The US Supreme Court plays a central role in American political and judicial life and will help define Donald Trump’s presidency. Now, it's confronted by an activist President keen to use his executive powers to transform America. Mark Damazer asks whether the Court’s nine Justices, with the conservatives a clear majority, will push back against the President. Critics fear that it will roll over and endorse his measures on everything from immigration, the definitions of citizenship, how universities should behave, the sacking of tens of thousands of government employees - and much more. Using extensive archive recordings of Supreme Court justices, politicians and protestors - and with a contribution from a recently retired Supreme Court justice - Mark shows that the Court has time and again generated electrifying drama. Presidents from both sides have raged about its decisions. None more so than the great liberal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in the 1930s was so furious with a conservative court that he devised a plan that convulsed the entire nation - to add extra judges who would support him. He lost. Mark Damazer also looks at the liberal Warren court of the 50s and 60s – which saw the largest step forward for civil rights in American legal history and met with fierce resistance from those who thought it was trampling over the Constitution – and the rights of individual states. And he sees how the nominations process, once calm and orderly, has now become raucous, deeply ideological and corrosive. With thanks to Oyez, a free law project by Justia and the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School, the Miller Center and the Supreme Court Historical Society. Producer: Sasha Edye-Lindner Executive Producer: Robert Nicholson A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4