Your civics textbook says the Supreme Court is a neutral umpire — nine robed experts reading the plain text of the Constitution, above politics. Does that hold up? This ReThink History series puts the ideal on trial. We trace the Court from the Framers' bargain in Article III — where judicial review isn't even written down — through the decisions that betrayed the promise: Dred Scott, which chose slavery and helped light the fuse of civil war; Plessy, which blessed Jim Crow; the Lochner era, which struck down child-labor laws in the name of "liberty"; and Korematsu, which saluted while 120,000 Americans were interned. We follow the fight over who sits on the Court — from FDR's court-packing gambit to the modern confirmation wars — and ask the question the textbook avoids: has one party shaped this Court disproportionately, or did things even out? Then we test the modern legitimacy crisis — Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, Shelby County, Dobbs — steelmanning both the "it's just politics" charge and the answer that the Court is finally staying in its lane. The host, a physician, opens with the day he lost faith in the Court's impartiality: when it ruled that nicotine — literally the name of a drug class — was beyond the FDA's reach. We end where every civics teacher has to: what do we tell the next generation of students? Not the myth. Not cynicism. Something truer and more useful. New episodes in the ReThink History series. Subscribe: youtube.com/@LetsRethinkHistory?sub_confirmation=1