The 2016 term of the Supreme Court beginning in October marks its 48th year in a row under the leadership of a conservative chief justice appointed by a Republican president. That is more than one-fifth of the Court’s history. Saying that the Court is a political institution is now like saying there is a global economy: It is simply a fact.

The Court has gotten increasingly more conservative with each of the Republican-appointed chief justices—Warren E. Burger (1969–1986), William H. Rehnquist (1986–2005), and John G. Roberts Jr. (2005–present). All told, Republican presidents have appointed 12 of the 16 most recent justices, including the chiefs. During Roberts’s first decade as chief, the Court was the most conservative in more than a half-century and likely the most conservative since the 1930s.

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Nonetheless, a federal judge can require preclearance under another section of the Voting Rights Act that remains good law, if the judge finds that voting discrimination was intentional. This issue is coming up in cases about “voter denial,” the number of which has surged, among other reasons, because Shelby County struck down the means of blocking denials. A liberal majority would likely uphold that requirement. A conservative majority would be unlikely to find intentional discrimination often, but it would also be unlikely to strike down that part of the law. Stanford Law School’s Pamela S. Karlan, who worked on voting-rights cases in the Obama Justice Department, argues in a forthcoming law-review article that “a nascent revival of judicial concern with poverty” is strengthening the tools judges have for rooting out and rejecting manipulations of voting rules that exclude poor minority voters. A liberal majority would likely uphold this use of such tools. A conservative majority would be unlikely to.