As of February 12, 2016, Barack Obama was in the White House, reality television star Donald Trump had just shocked the world by winning an actual Republican presidential primary, and the nine justices of the Supreme Court happened to be a relatively well-balanced bunch. John Roberts, the chief justice, helmed a four-justice conservative bloc with Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Antonin Scalia. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor comprised a four-justice liberal bloc. Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee with intermittent liberal sympathies, acted as the group’s occasional tie-breaking swing vote.

Scalia’s unexpected death the next morning, however, threatened to upend this delicate power dynamic. Overnight, President Obama found himself on the precipice of establishing the strongest liberal majority since the civil rights-era Warren Court some 50 years earlier—an accomplishment that would not be lost on a former constitutional law professor.

From there, things did not proceed as he hoped. Hours after Scalia’s death, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell declared that his Republican-controlled chamber would not vote on any nominee until after the 2016 election—an unprecedented escalation of Supreme Court politicking. Thereafter, Trump began sprinkling his wall-building pledges with promises to still-wary Republican voters that he’d protect the open seat from falling into liberal clutches. “If Hillary Clinton gets to put hard-leaning left judges on the Supreme Court, number one, your Second Amendment will be gone,” he warned at a rally in August. “Our country will never ever be the same.” In early 2017, he made good on that promise by tapping conservative appellate judge Neil Gorusch to take Scalia’s place, and Senate confirmed Gorsuch, 54-45. Later, McConnell would later call this stunt “the most consequential thing I’ve ever done.”

Then, in summer 2018, Kennedy announced his retirement, offering Trump the sudden opportunity to create a solid conservative majority. His choice was D.C. appellate judge Brett Kavanaugh, a longtime GOP operative who had a troubling, complicated relationship with the truth well before Dr. Christine Blasey Ford alleged that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when the two were high school students. Kavanaugh responded by begging his fellow Republicans for help and publicly excoriating Democrats who would dare question his right to the job to which he felt entitled. In the end, he was confirmed, 50-48, the closest margin in Senate history.

Over the past three years, thanks to this combination of shameless procedural shenanigans and a cynical embrace of judicial partisanship, the Republican Party has stocked the nation’s highest court—a purportedly neutral adjudicatory body—with justices empowered to spend the next few decades advancing conservative ideology. This is the hard-earned result of decades of careful planning by the Federalist Society, a well-financed organization of conservative judges and lawyers who sought to commandeer the federal judiciary on behalf of their agenda. And since the Constitution bestows life tenure on Supreme Court justices, unless Gorsuch or Kavanaugh were to murder a litigant during oral argument, there is no easy mechanism by which Democrats could unseat either man in order to counteract the injustices of their respective confirmations.

What Democrats could do, however, is dilute the practical impact of Gorsuch’s and Kavanaugh’s presence on the bench—by adding a few more seats to it. Such proposals, which have become popular among progressives alarmed at the right-wing’s successful efforts to hijack the federal judiciary, are known as “court-packing.”

Article III of the Constitution provides for the establishment of “one supreme Court,” but says nothing more about its size or composition. The framers left those questions to Congress, which in 1789 created a Court of six judges: five associates and one chief. But the politicking over this arrangement began almost immediately. In 1801, outgoing president John Adams and a lame-duck Congress passed a law eliminating one seat in order to prevent incoming president Thomas Jefferson from filling it. The new legislature promptly repealed the statute, and Jefferson appointed a sixth justice shortly thereafter.