With Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding Trump’s Muslim ban, Wednesday’s decision attacking public sector unions, and Justice Anthony Kennedy’s announcement that he’s retiring, it is time to push a once-marginal idea to the top of the agenda: pack the Supreme Court. The conservative majority’s support of Trumpism and opposition to progressive objectives means it will pose a barrier to the agenda of even the most left-leaning president and Congress. This barrier must be confronted head on.

Today, such ideas smell toxic to the average Democratic elected official — recall Al Gore’s surrender following Bush v. Gore in 2000, despite later evidence that he was the rightful winner of that election. But such deference wasn’t always the norm. There’s nothing in the Constitution specifying the number of judges, the precise organization of the federal judiciary, or even that the Court be empowered to review acts of Congress.

All of this was laid out in the early years of the American republic, through a series of judiciary acts in Congress and incremental power grabs by the Court. Political scientist Stephen Engel counts 833 efforts by Congress between 1800 and 1982 to reorganize the judiciary to constrain or channel political interests. And all of the successful impeachment convictions in US history (eight) were against judges, who also represented a majority of the nineteen impeachments handed down by the House of Representatives. This makes sense: the monarchy-averse founders were so distressed by even four-year presidential terms that they gave Congress the ability to remove them mid-course, so of course they would feel doubly cautious about lifetime judicial appointments — one of only two job specifications (the other being a non-diminishable salary).