The Supreme Courts six-member conservative supermajority will flex its muscle in a series of high-profile cases in 2022 that will agonize liberals while fulfilling some of the wildest dreams that have eluded the conservative movement since it came to power with Ronald Reagans 1980 presidential election.

The changes anticipated to abortion, affirmative action, gun rights, school prayer, rights of criminal suspects and the federal administrative state could transform U.S. law and upend American politics. This moment is the fruition of a decadeslong strategy by conservatives to seat justices willing to overturn elements of the New Deal order and rights revolution of the 1960s and 70s that presidents and Congresses could not through executive action and legislation.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, presidential administrations and the judicial branch, in particular, expanded rights granted under the Constitution beyond the protection of property and the incorporation of business to protect individual citizens, including women, racial minorities, criminal suspects and workers, for the first time.

Reagan, and the conservative movement that brought him to power, intended to end this liberal project and reverse its gains. His administrations efforts to repudiate the previous 50 years of American governance started with a push for legislation and constitutional amendments. While Reagan was able to end the New Deal era, conservatives could not roll back the advances of civil and voting rights, the rights of women to bodily autonomy or the removal of Christian prayer from schools. They also could not rid themselves of the influence of the federal administrative state, which grew deeper every decade since its vast expansion during the New Deal.

And so they turned to the courts.

The Federalist Society formed in 1982 with the help of close Reagan aides like Ed Meese, with the aim of training and promoting conservative lawyers. Its ranks would soon populate the federal bench, as Reagan became the first president since Franklin Roosevelt to appoint more than half of the federal judiciary.