While the nation's highest court barely got a mention this election season, President Barack Obama could reshape the conservative-leaning Supreme Court now that he has won.
To be sure, two of the court's oldest justices are liberals: 79-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg and 74-year-old Stephen Breyer.
But other septuagenarians fill the court's less liberal wing, too – namely the mercurial swing vote Anthony Kennedy and the bombastic right-winger Antonin Scalia, both of whom are 76.
If Kennedy retires, Obama can replace him with a justice who more frequently sides with liberals on issues from employee rights to class-action lawsuits, Daniel Fisher writes for Forbes.
And Obama could have a chance to replace Scalia with a justice who's his ideological opposite.
Since Obama already appointed Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, he could conceivably have a chance to be responsible for half of the court's justices, Paul Brandus pointed out in The Week.
And a liberal-leaning court could undo past decisions that favored conservatives like Citizens United, which opened the door for corporations to freely bankroll elections.
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