The ink was barely dry on the Supreme Court’s ruling expanding the scope and understanding of the Second Amendment right to bear arms when a five-justice majority eliminated, root and branch, what for nearly 50 years was an expectation of every American and their families: that women have a fundamental right to decide to end their pregnancy up to the moment of fetal viability. Roe v. Wade, which since 1973 has enshrined this protection, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 ruling that reaffirmed that landmark’s “central holding,” are dead and gone—a result that was born not of careful decision-making and analytic rigor, but of power. The power of five justices—three of them installed by a president who twice lost the popular vote by wide margins, and confirmed by a Senate that represents less than half of the American electorate—who decided, with a straight face, that the issue of abortion is one that must be returned to the people and their representatives.

In these justices’ telling, their decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, radical and destabilizing though it may be in reality, is really one of modesty and respect for democracy. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion,” writes Justice Samuel Alito in the conclusion of his 79-page opinion, which is largely similar in tone and substance to the leaked draft that shook up our politics in early May. “Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.” Joining him were Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

These last three, all of them benefactors of Donald Trump, are the reason the end of Roe is possible. The court Ruth Bader Ginsburg left in 2020 wouldn’t not have agreed to hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Mississippi case that today did away with nearly half a century of American law. Indeed, when the case arrived at the Supreme Court in early 2020, the request to hear it sat unresolved in the court’s docket until May 2021. By then, the Supreme Court was no longer the Roberts court, but the Trump court—and Mississippi, which hadn’t even asked to overrule Roe in its initial petition, took advantage of this change in personnel and fortunes. Every justice creates a new court, the saying goes, and now the state had a chance to go for broke. And it did. And other Republican-led states took notice too—passing a raft of abortion restrictions, some of the most extreme and draconian our nation has ever seen, because they knew they now had a captive audience at the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice John Roberts, as weakened as ever, did not join much of the Alito opinion released Friday because he is a formalist who recognized it for what it is: a procedural “gambit.” Too much, too soon. “The Court’s decision to overrule Roe and Casey is a serious jolt to the legal system—regardless of how you view those cases,” Roberts wrote. “A narrower decision rejecting the misguided viability line would be markedly less unsettling, and nothing more is needed to decide this case.” In other words, if judicial restraint means anything, it may mean to keep Roe alive while undermining it slowly, cut by cut. For Roberts, this is what courage looks like. (Justice Thomas, long an ardent opponent of abortion, suggested in a separate concurrence what many have feared: that he’s coming for what the law calls “substantive due process,” which has long protected rights that aren’t enumermated in the Constitution, such as the use of contraception and choosing whom to marry.)

Not so for the Trump justices, who joined Roe’s demise unreservedly. Yet for two of them, Gorsuch and Barrett, their cowardly silence speaks louder than any words they may have written. Because they surely know the politics of what they’ve done are too obvious to defend or deny publicly, these justices—each of them a self-proclaimed originalist who believes the meaning of the Constitution is frozen in time—quietly signed their names to Alito’s decision without writing a single line of reasoning or defense of their own. Gorsuch may well be embarrassed that Justice Anthony Kennedy, for whom he clerked and is still alive, is one of the authors who cowrote the Casey plurality that upheld Roe. And for Barrett, who before becoming a judge signed an antiabortion ad, the act of explaining herself may well appear farcical.

Kavanaugh, whom Susan Collins said would never do what he did today, did explain himself, but only to offer a fig leaf: that letting states decide abortion is the way things ought to be because doing anything else—including protecting a constitutional right—is akin to “taking sides” in an extremely difficult moral and policy question. Better for us to stay neutral and even handed. “After today’s decision, the nine Members of this Court will no longer decide the basic legality of pre-viability abortion for all 330 million Americans,” Kavanaugh insists.

Yet as justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan observed in a potent dissent they issued jointly, there’s nothing neutral or modest about undermining a fundamental right that for decades has been the fabric of people’s lives. The very point of constitutional protections, such as that of gay people to get married or for women to obtain contraception, is that they cannot be subject to the whims of the electorate or politicians. “The point of all these examples is that when it comes to rights, the Court does not act ‘neutrally’ when it leaves everything up to the States,” the liberal justices write. “Rather, the Court acts neutrally when it protects the right against all comers. And to apply that point to the case here: When the Court decimates a right women have held for 50 years, the Court is not being ‘scrupulously neutral.’ It is instead taking sides: against women who wish to exercise the right, and for States (like Mississippi) that want to bar them from doing so.”

Since Barrett joined the Supreme Court, these dissenters have been lonely and powerless, and there’s no reason to think that things will change when Breyer formally steps down this summer and Ketanji Brown Jackson takes his seat. Because of this powerlessness to move the law, or at least to protect what’s left of it, they can only protest—and do so loudly, with arguments, and as much moral clarity as possible. In this regard, perhaps the most striking feature of their joint dissent, which extends for 60 pages and includes an appendix explaining how the majority distorted the principle of stare decisis to reach a desired outcome, is its focus on power. Their opinion includes a citation to one of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s final warnings as he was preparing to step down in 1991, only one year before the fate of abortion rights, then in their youth, seemed to hang by a thread: “Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decisionmaking,” Marshall wrote.

That section of the dissenters’ opinion, which begins on page 57 and runs for a few pages, is worth reading in full, because it lays out the stakes of what it means to wield power simply because new justices believe in a “new doctrinal school,” act “by dint of numbers,” or simply because they can. Power in numbers, not reason, is indeed what drives this Supreme Court, which continues to slash and burn without regard for its standing in the eyes of the public, already at its lowest in history. “For all of us, in our time on this Court, that has never been more true than today,” the dissenters continue. “In overruling Roe and Casey, this Court betrays its guiding principles. With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent.”