“We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts thundered on Tuesday in celebration of the Supreme Court’s decision granting Donald Trump, and all future presidents, sweeping immunity from prosecution. This judge-led revolution, he added ominously, “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Kevin Roberts is not alone in cheering the Supreme Court’s hard turn to the right as a de facto revolution. The New Civil Liberties Alliance, a far-right group that welcomed coup abettors into its fold, trumpeted that “the dismantling of the unlawful Administrative State has officially begun” after SCOTUS overturned the 40-year-old doctrine of Chevron deference. Republican officials, commentators, and activists are jubilant over the court’s recent rulings, applauding them as the dawn of a new era in American governance. And they’re not wrong. While Democrats fret for a second week over the fallout from President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, many Republicans seem to feel as if they’ve won already, entrenching many tenets of Heritage’s Project 2025 into law before a single vote has been cast.

The GOP’s triumphant attitude is neither premature nor overconfident. Four months out from November, the party has abruptly prevailed in many of its most important political battles, albeit in the cold, technical prose—you might even call it “bloodless”—of judicial opinions. The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority has, in recent weeks, restructured American democracy in the Republican Party’s preferred image, fundamentally altering the balance of power between the branches and the citizens themselves. As the GOP became the party of coup denialism and unreconstructed Trump cultists, so too, finally, have the sober movement conservatives at the high court.

In the course of its most recent term that conservative supermajority has created a monarchical presidency, awarding the chief executive near-insurmountable immunity from accountability for any and all crimes committed during a term in office. It has seized power from Congress, strictly limiting lawmakers’ ability to write broad laws that tackle the major crises of the moment. And it has hobbled federal agencies’ authority to apply existing statutes to problems on the ground, substituting the expert opinions of civil servants with the (often partisan) preferences of unelected judges. All the while, the court has placed itself at the apex of the state, agreeing to share power only with a strongman president who seeks to govern in line with the conservative justices’ vision.

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Someday historians will manage to explain why the same Roberts court that declined to rig the 2020 census in favor of Republicans, declined to intervene in the bogus 2020 election fraud cases, declined to rubber-stamp a wholly fabricated “Independent State Legislature Theory,” and refused to protect from........

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