Republicans would simply wait until a Republican president was in office. Then in 2017, when Democrats filibustered President Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch, Reid’s party paid the price for his decision. Despite the Republicans’ age-old talk about the importance of protecting minority rights in the Senate, McConnell eliminated the filibuster on Supreme Court nominations to push Gorsuch’s nomination through. “This will be the first, and last, partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court justice,” the Kentucky conservative said on the floor. The Republican Senate has also approved the president’s appellate nominees at a faster rate than all other recent presidents. Under Trump, there has been much more consent from the Republican Senate than advise.

Republicans realized that conservative organizations and hardball legislative politics were not enough on their own. Certain landmark decisions would be extremely difficult to overturn given stare decisis, the doctrine that means, generally, that prior decisions by the Court should be adhered to. Regarding abortion, for example, Republican legislators have been much more focused on slowly gutting the ability to get an abortion than on attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade altogether. Republican Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois was one of the architects of this strategy. In 1976, he successfully added an amendment to legislation that prohibited the use of Medicaid funds to pay for an abortion, except when the life of the mother was in danger or in cases of incest and rape. This strategy has been replicated numerous times as Congress has expanded the reach of the Hyde amendment beyond Medicaid, while Republican legislatures have enacted similar restrictions on government funding for abortion on the state level.

The strategic move by conservatives away from overturning Roe v. Wade and toward death by a thousand cuts has allowed conservative justices to uphold legislation that undercuts the right to get an abortion without restrictions. Most recently, Justice Gorsuch was one member of the five-person majority that voted to uphold a California law stipulating that pregnancy crisis centers that do not provide abortions don’t have to tell patients they can obtain the procedure elsewhere and that the centers don’t have to disclose whether they have a medical license. When Republicans like Senator Collins or Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina promise that they won’t vote for a nominee who would overturn Roe, their statement is somewhat meaningless, because the real action has been on legislation that gradually erodes the meaning of the right to get an abortion rather than on simply overturning the decision itself.

To reach the point where conservatives are today, they also had to swallow some of their principles. One of the most important and influential decisions that conservative organizations and Republican politicians have made along the way to Monday’s pick has been supporting a president who will follow through on their judicial agenda. Evangelical organizations, which have historically been politically pragmatic when deciding which politicians to support, and their Republican allies took the most strikingly hypocritical stand by working for the candidacy and presidency of a person whose personal behavior contradicts so much of what they claim to stand for. As candidate, Trump made a very clear promise that he would appoint nominees they supported, and he followed through on his promise with Gorsuch.