“Think of the Supreme Court,” the Republican Party repeatedly urged skeptics of Donald Trump during the general election in 2016. Conservatives who found themselves lost at sea in a cycle dominated by grassroots populism and the tenacious popularity of the billionaire candidate riding its wave fretted whether they would find themselves locked out, regardless of which candidate won the election. Republican leaders and the Trump campaign insisted that conservatives had only one chance left to save the Supreme Court from a progressive takeover, and eventually conservatives cast their bets on Trump.

This week, that bet paid off – and perhaps more robustly than conservatives might have hoped.