that could further gut the Voting Rights Act. There’s some uncertainty as to how the justices will come down on several of these key cases. But there’s hardly any doubt that the conservative supermajority will exert partisan power; it’s simply a matter of how much. “The first term of the 6-3 supermajority—conservative Republican-built—on the Supreme Court was a disaster for individual liberties,” Johnson says.
The problem isn’t just the substance of the rulings; it’s that the Supreme Court has amassed more and more power—and is increasingly using it to advance goals that Republicans failed to accomplish themselves through the political process. “They lost policy fights in Congress or in the executive branch, and so now they’re trying to win them in the court,” says the University of Texas Law School’s.