It’s the season to make big promises. With the presidential election fast approaching, candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are pledging to lift the middle class, revive the economy and restore the United States’ position in the world, among a slew of more technical policy plans.

Obviously, some of these proposals will be easier to fulfill than others. There are some areas in which the U.S. president can act almost unilaterally, and others that lie almost entirely out of the president’s control. But for voters who haven’t taken a civics class in years, it may be hard to distinguish one from the other.

So which election promises is your candidate actually likely to keep? Bernadette Meyler, a constitutional scholar at Stanford Law School, weighed in.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How much power does the president really have? Do people believe there’s more power in the office than there really is?

People definitely imagine the president has more authority than he or she actually does. At the same time, we’re at a particular moment when whoever is elected president may wind up having more power than a normal president would. That’s partly because the Supreme Court still has a vacancy from this past term, when Justice Scalia passed away, and there was a failure to confirm a new justice.

The Supreme Court, which is usually the final check on a lot of executive action, is not exercising its functions in a normal way right now. We see this with a decision like the United States vs. Texas, where the court was split 4-4. In the case of the Supreme Court being equally divided, the lower court opinion is just affirmed.

So, first of all, appointing a new Supreme Court justice would be a large exercise of power for the new president. And then even in the absence of the confirmation of someone new, if the Supreme Court isn’t operating normally, that might give the president more latitude.