Since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, he has acted as though he has the powers of a king. He has fired independent agency heads and tens of thousands of federal employees, dismantled vital federal agencies and programs, kidnapped people and deported them for extrajudicial imprisonment, brought criminal charges against his perceived enemies, and deployed troops in American cities to aid his efforts to carry out mass deportations.

Trump could not have done all this without help from the Supreme Court. The right-wing justices helped Trump win re-election, most dramatically with their 2024 decision Trump v. United States, which granted him broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office. Since January, the same justices have been busy using the Court’s shadow docket to reverse lower court decisions and rubber-stamp the administration’s actions, often by a 5-4 or 6-3 margin.

In the new term that began in October, Chief Justice John Roberts is continuing his decades-long project of killing pro-democracy laws: By next June, the Court could destroy what’s left of the Voting Rights Act and eliminate vital campaign finance restrictions, which will help Trump and his party maintain power.

It can feel like ordinary people are powerless to do anything about this. But even though voters can’t vote Supreme Court justices out of office, we do not have to accept a system in which the Court allows our government to become an autocracy. What people can do in the face of a Court that seems determined to crown a king is demand that candidates and elected officials support meaningful Court reform, and commit to enacting it as soon as it is politically possible.