![President Obama's Final State of the Union, Jan 12, 9pm ET](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/files/tout_images/sotu2016_featured_blog.jpg)
"What difference does it make if the Court has eight members or nine members?"
The audience at the Georgetown University Law Center laughed when the Vice President Biden posed this question during his remarks there yesterday. But it's a question that many Republicans in the Senate are genuinely asking right now, and every American needs to know the answer to it.
There are few people better positioned to break this down for us than the Vice President, who served in the U.S. Senate for 36 years and oversaw the fair nomination processes of nine Supreme Court justices as either Chairman or Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee. (Much to his chagrin, that's more than anyone else alive today.)
Watch him explain why a nine-member court matters now: