# Behind the Feud: Why Lee and Chief Justice Cho Are Really Fighting Over a Court Seat > President Lee's rejection of a Supreme Court nominee is not just a procedural dispute. It traces back to a 2025 ruling that overturned his acquittal weeks before the election, a decision his party has called judicial interference ever since. - Source: Korea First - Canonical URL: https://koreafirst.tv/article/behind-the-feud-why-lee-and-chief-justice-cho-are-really-fighting-over-a-court-seat - Author: Korea First Staff - Section: Politics - Published: 2026-08-30T13:58:02.990Z - Updated: 2026-08-30T13:58:02.990Z - Tags: Lee Jae-myung, Cho Hee-dae, Supreme Court, judicial reform, election law, Democratic Party - Korean edition: https://koreafirst.tv/ko/article/behind-the-feud-why-lee-and-chief-justice-cho-are-really-fighting-over-a-court-seat --- The standoff between President Lee Jae-myung and Chief Justice Cho Hee-dae over a Supreme Court vacancy looks, on its surface, like a dispute over paperwork. Underneath, it traces back to a Supreme Court ruling from last year that Lee's own party has never stopped calling an act of election interference. The immediate dispute concerns Son Bong-gi, a senior judge at the Daegu District Court, whom Cho recommended for the vacant seat on August 18, after nearly seven months without agreement between the two sides on a nominee. Lee refused to forward the recommendation to the National Assembly for confirmation and instead asked Cho to put forward someone else, a request the Chief Justice was still weighing as of this reporting, with an official response promised for later in the week. ## A Ruling That Still Casts a Shadow To understand why that refusal landed so hard, it helps to go back to March 2025, when the Seoul High Court acquitted Lee of violating the Public Official Election Act. The Supreme Court then took up the case on an expedited basis and overturned that acquittal just 36 days after the appeals court's decision, a ruling that came down only 33 days before the presidential election. The court described its own pace as swift and intensive review required under election law, but Lee's Democratic Party has characterized the timing and outcome as interference in the vote itself, an accusation that has never fully faded from the relationship between the party in power and the court. ## A Reform Push Born From That Anger That 2025 ruling did not stay a one-time grievance. It fed directly into a Democratic Party push for judicial reform that has included proposals to expand the size of the Supreme Court, allow constitutional complaints against court rulings, and create penalties for what the party calls judicial distortion. Seen against that backdrop, Lee's rejection of Cho's nominee looks less like an isolated procedural dispute and more like the latest move in an ongoing contest over how much independence the courts should retain from the political branches that appoint their leadership. ## The Legal Argument Underneath Presidential spokesperson Kang Yu-jung has framed the rejection in constitutional terms, arguing that the president's power to appoint justices must be properly exercised as something separate from the chief justice's power to recommend them, rather than treated as a rubber stamp on whatever name the court puts forward. The opposition People Power Party rejects that reading, warning that if a recommendation can simply be refused, the chief justice's nominating role becomes effectively meaningless and judicial independence suffers as a result. ## A Process With No Fixed Rules Part of what makes the standoff hard to resolve is that the process itself has always relied on informal consultation rather than fixed procedure. A recommendation committee narrowed the field to four candidates back in January to replace retiring Justice Rho Tae-ak, and historically presidents and chief justices have worked out their differences before a nominee was ever formally announced. This time, the disagreement became public and unresolved, leaving both a Supreme Court seat and a broader argument about the separation of powers open at the same time. --- Originally published by Korea First. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://koreafirst.tv/article/behind-the-feud-why-lee-and-chief-justice-cho-are-really-fighting-over-a-court-seat.