Two years after Clarence Thomas’s bruising confirmation hearing in 1991, The New York Times reported that the Supreme Court justice told two of his law clerks that he planned to serve until 2034. That would give him a record tenure of 43 years on the nation’s highest tribunal. But superlatives were not the reason for his goal. “The liberals made my life miserable for 43 years,” he reportedly told them, “and I’m going to make their lives miserable for 43 years.”

Since joining the court, Thomas has often called for his colleagues to revisit major precedents that he believes are at odds with the Constitution’s meaning. Many of those decisions sprang from the era between 1954 to 1969 when the court’s liberal wing, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, reshaped American society like no other Supreme Court before or since. Thomas’s quest has often been a lonely one, thanks to the moderation of conservative justices like Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy. But a series of recent dissents from Thomas and his most conservative colleagues shows how he may yet win.

The Warren Court amounted to a third American revolution of sorts, after the original and the Reconstruction era. Its decisions on the allocation of power in American political life helped transform the United States into a liberal democracy. The justices swept away the legal architecture of American racial apartheid—most famously in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in schools, and Loving v. Virginia, which overturned laws against interracial marriage—and upheld federal civil-rights legislation. It broke the rural stranglehold on state legislatures by mandating the one man, one vote principle for legislative districts. Americans accused of crimes gained a bevy of new rights: to an attorney even if they couldn’t afford it, to toss out illegally obtained evidence, to receive any exculpatory evidence obtained by police. First Amendment protections for newspapers and protesters grew stronger, and reproductive rights gained constitutional recognition for the first time in Griswold v. Connecticut.

It was a halcyon era for American liberals, but not everyone was thrilled. The Warren Court’s landmark decisions spurred a backlash on the political right. Social conservatives railed against the court’s rulings against prayer in public schools and legalized access to contraception. Southern whites rebelled against desegregation orders, at times prompting the federal government to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision by force. Libertarians denounced the vast expansion of federal power at the perceived cost to individual liberty. From this medley of opposition grew the intellectual foundations of the modern Republican Party.

In a way, the legal war against the Warren Court has been underway for decades too. The court, after shifting rightward in the 1970s and 1980s, frequently narrowed major precedents from that era. Conservative legal scholars rallied around originalism, a theory of constitutional interpretation that claims allegiance to the original meaning of the nation’s founding charter. Originalists, most prominently Justice Antonin Scalia until his death in 2016, tend to be highly critical of landmark Warren Court rulings for stepping beyond what they think the Constitution allows. With originalism’s rising influence on the high court, the war may reach new heights.