Even the most preternaturally pessimistic conservatives and libertarians can celebrate an unmistakable triumph in recent years:  American courts’ abandonment of the adolescent left-wing conceit that judges exist to create laws, in favor of the more adult proposition that their role is to objectively interpret and apply laws.  

That progress reflects decades of painstaking effort to cultivate legal scholars and elect presidents and United States Senators who nominate and confirm them as judges.  

The effort remains incomplete, however, which Americans must remember as November’s midterm elections approach.  

As we mark another new United States Supreme Court term this month, we must also remember that enforcing positive decisions demands ongoing vigilance, because too many government officials, employers and educational administrators apparently consider Supreme Court rulings mere suggestions subject to ongoing defiance.  

For example, the Supreme Court's announcement this week that it will hear Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Board of Education, where Maryland school officials allegedly employed murky admissions criteria to discriminate against Asian American students.  Specifically, magnet schools used socioeconomic characteristics as proxies for race in admissions decisions, which Asian-American parents contend unlawfully disadvantage their children.  

Keep in mind that just three years ago, the Supreme Court struck down racial preferences in educational admissions.  Apparently, however, it must once again need to explain that constitutional prohibitions can’t be casually circumvented through clever administrative wordplay.  

The glass-is-half-full perspective, however, is that at least there’s positive Supreme Court precedent to enforce.  

In previous decades, the Supreme Court and lower courts regularly ignored the plain meaning of laws to do such things as wink and nod in permitting racial discrimination in admissions and hiring decisions under the soothing label “affirmative action.”  

Accordingly, scholars and elected leaders invested enormous intellectual and institutional effort to cultivate judges committed to fairness and the rule of law.  Through organizations such as the Federalist Society, as well as in law schools, legal scholarship and judicial appointments, they challenged the once-dominant notion that laws and constitutional rights should be determined by judges' fashionable left-wing policy preferences.  

In more recent decades, that investment and activism have yielded extraordinary dividends.  

Consider the Second Amendment’s individual right to keep and bear arms.  

For generations, opponents of private firearms ownership for self-defense and sporting maintained that the Second Amendment somehow protected only collective militia activity, notwithstanding the Amendment's unmistakable reference to "the right of the people."  

In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court finally rejected that preposterous misinterpretation, affirming an individual right to possess firearms for lawful purposes, including self-defense.  Two years later in McDonald v. Chicago (2010), the Court applied that same protection against state and local governments.  More recently in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), it deepened protections against arbitrary bureaucratic restriction incompatible with constitutional protections.  

Too many jurisdictions, however, continue imposing restrictions that test those precedents' boundaries, including an important case before the Court this term.  

Or consider the First Amendment.  

In the much-maligned and mischaracterized Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Court rejected governmental restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations and unions, vindicating the obvious proposition that political speech doesn't lose constitutional protection merely because citizens organize collectively to express it.  

Government cannot ration political expression in favor of the leftist mainstream media, regardless of how reassuringly it labels such censorship "campaign finance reform."  

And on the issue of racial discrimination, as noted above, the Court finally rejected discriminatory systems that had survived for decades under the euphemistic banner "affirmative action."  

As Chief Justice John Roberts succinctly wrote in an earlier ruling, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”   

That progress illustrates why elections matter far beyond who occupies the White House.  

Indeed, the confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett demonstrate how Senate control shapes constitutional jurisprudence for generations.  

Accordingly, as November's midterm elections approach, voters should remember that their Senate choices determine considerably more than legislative majorities, committee chairmanships or the latest spending extravaganza.  They ultimately determine who interprets the Constitution.  

Moreover, unlike ordinary legislation, which subsequent Congressional majorities can repeal, federal judicial appointments carry lifetime tenure, and their rulings endure far beyond their departures.  

The Constitution's protections shouldn’t require perpetual renegotiation with bureaucrats who dislike them, and even landmark judicial victories require continued vigilance against officials determined to circumvent them.  

Voters would be wise to remember that this November.