Neither the Founding generation nor their children nor their children’s children, right on down to our grandparents’ generation, were so passive about their role as republican citizens. They would not have accepted-did not accept-being told that a lawyerly elite had charge of the Constitution, and they would have been incredulous if told (as we are often told today) that the main reason to worry about who becomes president is that the winner will control judicial appointments. Something would have gone terribly wrong, they believed, if an unelected judiciary were being given that kind of importance and deference. Perhaps such a country could still be called democratic, but it would no longer be the kind of democracy Americans had fought and died and struggled to create.
– Larry D. Kramer, former Dean of Stanford Law School [1]

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According to exit polls, 75% of Trump voters ranked the future of the Supreme Court as an important factor in their vote. So, now that Republicans won this election, does it mean the courts are automatically fixed and we are out of the danger zone? Do we just fill Scalia’s seat with an originalist and live happily ever after?

Not so fast.

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