For American progressives, something far greater than the presidency was lost last week. Thanks to unprecedented and indeed unprincipled obstruction by Senate Republicans, Donald Trump will enter the White House with a supreme court vacancy to fill. Having failed to win control of the Senate, and with Republicans there promising to do away with the filibuster rule for supreme court nominations, it is now president-elect Trump’s prerogative to fill the high court seat that has sat empty for almost nine months, with any jurist he wishes, and to fill myriad judicial vacancies in the lower courts – some of which have remained empty for lengthy stretches, also due to GOP obstruction.

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In the near term, replacing Antonin Scalia with another rock-ribbed conservative – if Trump’s list of 21 possible nominees are any indication – simply means that America returns to a 5-4 court dominated by conservatives, with Anthony Kennedy occasionally (but with increasing frequency) defecting to vote with the liberals. In the longer term, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 83, Anthony Kennedy 80 and Stephen Breyer at 78, Trump may have an opportunity to swing the high court to the hard right for decades. He has said that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are his model jurists. A few more such nominations in place of a Ginsburg or Kennedy will spell the end of the Warren court revolution, from the demise of Roe v Wade, to the slow erosion of racial and gender protections and environmental regulations.

In the coming months and years, even a 5-4 supreme court dominated by conservatives can launch that project in very concrete ways, including two cases in which it tied 4-4 last year: one on President Obama’s immigration executive order, and another which will decide the future funding for all public sector unions. In both cases, plus a case already on the court’s docket regarding an Obama administration regulation on bathrooms for transgender students, it can be assumed that the court will tack right again, perhaps even as soon as this spring.

Justices Ginsburg and Breyer could live for 10 years … you can be certain they are taking their vitamins after Tuesday

A 5-4 court will also put its stamp of approval on another major legal project that involves dismantling civil rights laws in the name of the religious liberty of objectors. That started with the supreme court’s 2014 Hobby Lobby decision – allowing the religious owners of for-profit corporations to deny coverage for contraception to their secular workers, even when those workers had a statutory entitlement to it. A follow-on to that case from last term, in which religious non-profits – schools and hospitals – sought to similarly deny their workers such contraception, was sent back to the lower courts without guidance by an 8-0 court. You can be certain that when it returns to the supreme court, the objecting employees will be told to find their birth control elsewhere. In any event, it won’t matter much in these cases if President-elect Trump makes good on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act on his first day in office.

But last spring, at the end of the term, the court refused to hear a case from pharmacists who have religious objections to even stocking birth control. The dissenting justices were furious that the court declined to hear the case, contending that this was discrimination on the basis of religion. In the coming years, even without another supreme court seat to fill, watch for religious liberty claims from those who object to marriage equality, abortion, birth control, and other protections for women and LGBTQ Americans, fall prey to these kinds of religious freedom challenges.

And you can also expect the reconstituted 5-4 supreme court to take a wrecking ball to President Obama’s environmental protections, just as President-elect Trump promises to reverse any executive actions on that front and withdraw from international agreements. It will also continue John Roberts’ project of dismantling voter protections for minority, young and older voters, ensuring that future elections will proceed on the premise that white Americans have a right to vote and minorities must continue to fight to do so.

Certainly it is possible that Justices Ginsburg and Breyer will live for 10 more years, and you can be certain that they are both taking their vitamins after last Tuesday. It is possible, but highly unlikely, that Democrats take the Senate in 2018, making it possible for Democrats to obstruct future Trump nominees. That looks highly unlikely right now, which means that if Trump has even a single appointment in the next four years, everything from Roe to worker protections to controls over policing and the death penalty will be back in the crosshairs.

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None of this begins to match the importance of four years of Trump judges in the lower federal courts and the federal appeals courts, an area in which President Obama has had a massive impact in recent years, even if it went largely unnoticed by the press and the electorate. Obama has tilted most of the federal appeals court to the left in his eight-year term, and those appointees serve for life. But Obama has also seen 20 of his district court nominees filibustered during his time in office, whereas that had only happened three times in previous administrations. And as a result of Republican obstruction of Obama’s judicial nominations in the Senate, 35 lower courts are sufficiently shorthanded as to be designated “judicial emergencies”. That is up from 12 when Obama took office.

In other words, Trump will benefit not only from a Senate controlled by Republicans, but from the eight years of prior Senate obstruction that held up Obama nominees – perfectly qualified and usually moderate – leaving the lower courts and the supreme court short-staffed. In other words, Senate Republicans not only control the playing field, they spent their time in the Senate benching Obama players.

President-elect Trump will begin to name his judges in the coming weeks and months. If his shortlist is anything to go by they will make expanding gun rights and contracting reproductive freedoms their priority. America will live with the consequences of those decisions for decades after a Trump presidency is over.