Last week, the Supreme Court wrapped up a full term without Anthony Kennedy for the first time in thirty years. Liberals can sum up the experience in five words: It could have been worse. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation last October marked an ideological turning point for the court, one that will reshape American lives for decades to come. But that shift has yet to be fully realized.

Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land for now. The justices blocked Louisiana’s clinic-closure law from going into effect in February and haven’t yet taken up an abortion-rights case on the merits, despite Justice Clarence Thomas’s strident protests. And while the conservative justices handed Republicans a major victory last week by ruling that federal judges can’t fix gerrymandered legislative districts, Chief Justice John Roberts also delivered a setback to the party’s efforts to pervert the 2020 census. There may be cause for relief for liberals today, but there is little reason for optimism tomorrow.

The star of this term was Roberts, who presided as both its chief justice and its ideological fulcrum. The court’s final day offered a testament to his influence. Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause, where the court ruled 5–4 along traditional ideological lines that partisan gerrymandering is beyond the federal judiciary’s power to remedy. That ruling will likely embolden Republican state lawmakers to entrench their legislative majorities even more aggressively after next year’s census, especially in the states already sliding toward illiberal democracy.

The day wasn’t as bad as it could have been. In Department of Commerce v. New York, the court handed a serious blow to the Trump administration’s campaign to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a 5–4 majority with the court’s liberals, drew the obvious conclusion from the facts at hand: The administration’s sole articulated rationale for adding the question “seems to have been contrived.” It’s the first time the court has substantively ruled against President Donald Trump, who threatened to delay the census to give time for the Commerce Department to craft a new rationale for the question.

It might be tempting to think of Roberts as a swing justice in the footsteps of Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor before him. That would be a mistake. Conservative pundits often rail against Roberts for his vote to save the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate in 2012, and they saw last week’s vote on the citizenship question as more evidence of his apostasy. This would misread Roberts’s approach to American political power, though. His votes on campaign-finance laws and voting rights have structurally tilted American politics toward conservative political forces while preserving as much of the court’s public legitimacy as possible.