President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance and the consequent Democratic outburst of panic and rage largely overshadowed the end of this year’s U.S. Supreme Court term, which concluded last week with a bombshell decision on presidential immunity. The court held that presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts taken while in power, although private actions are not subject to immunity. It was a significant victory for Trump, as it all but ensured he will not face a criminal trial ahead of the upcoming presidential contest regarding his efforts to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election.

“This is devastating to many people who might look at the Supreme Court as an institution that could be relied on to protect democracy,” said Skye Perryman, senior adviser at Demand Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy group, which recently launched a $10 million campaign to both push for court reforms and engage voters affected by recent rulings.

The court’s composition—and the ways in which it has transformed American politics and the judiciary’s role in it—is arguably the most important consequence of the 2016 election. Although the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning the right to an abortion is perhaps the court’s best-known ruling this decade, the justices have also handed down key rulings narrowing voting rights, expanding access to firearms, limiting corruption laws, and rolling back environmental regulations. The court includes two of the four most conservative justices to sit on the Supreme Court since 1937—Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas—according to recent data analysis by professors from Washington University in St. Louis and Penn State.

The decision on presidential immunity was just one of several rulings this summer with long-lasting repercussions for the American political system. Collectively they illustrate the extent to which the Supreme Court justices have placed themselves and the judicial branch at the center of U.S. politics and policymaking. “This particular Supreme Court has made it such that they are the final arbiters of what can and cannot be in this country,” said Devon Ombres, senior director for courts and legal policy at the Center for American Politics, a progressive think tank. He added that the court has become “effectively the primary policymakers in this country,” arguing that presidents and lawmakers will be unable to enact progressive policy agendas.

It marks the culmination of a long-term conservative legal strategy aimed at remaking the judiciary. Where the right once inveighed against judges making policy from the bench, they are now reaping the rewards of what critics deem a new conservative judicial activism. “None of this was an accident,” former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn told The New York Times.........

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