The Biggest Threat in the Postal Report Is to Rural Americans, Not Amazon

On Tuesday, President Trump’s task force on the U.S. Postal Service’s troubled finances released its report on the future of the agency. The word “Amazon” appears nowhere in the body of the report, only in an appendix listing organizations that provided input. But virtually every article about the report led with the possibility that Amazon would have to pay more to use the USPS for package delivery.

“Postal report puts muscle behind Trump’s Amazon grudge,” Axios blared. “Postal Service Review Proposes Sweeping Changes Likely to Hit Amazon,” said The Wall Street Journal. “Postal service should be allowed to charge more for packages, review following Trump spat with Amazon finds,” CNBC reported.

This response is understandable, given that Trump ordered the creation of the task force shortly after alleging that Amazon was taking advantage of the Postal Service. But the impact on Amazon is not the most important piece of this study. The task force did not recommend selling off the Postal Service, as some feared it would. But it did suggest a radical change that would separate the Postal Service from its core mission: to provide unfettered access to communication and commerce to all citizens, regardless of who they are or where they live. Such a change would be an attack on the individual freedom of all Americans, but especially those in poor, rural communities.

The USPS was established in the Second Continental Congress of 1775, before there was a United States. For nearly 250 years, its operations have been guided by the universal service obligation. This guarantees regular postal service to every American residence and business at a standard, affordable price. It includes six-day delivery and post offices within every zip code. No area of the country is discriminated against, no matter how costly or difficult to reach. The universal service obligation is funded by giving the USPS exclusive access to the mailbox and a monopoly on letter delivery.

The statutory language says the intent of the universal service obligation is to “bind the Nation together” with “prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas.” Before the digital age, access to the postal service equaled access to information and the ability to conduct commerce. If a black family was restricted from shopping at a department store, they could use the Sears & Roebuck catalog and have goods delivered to them. If an engaged citizen wanted to learn about their democracy, the reduced rate for media mail gave them that opportunity. In short, the USPS was about connecting the country.

In the Internet age, it’s easy to scoff at the USPS. But it still serves a critical function, particularly in rural areas where the digital divide still looms. There’s no question that e-mail has damaged USPS finances, although not as much as a crippling rule established by Republicans in 2006 that requires the agency to pre-fund its retirement and health benefits for the next 75 years, therefore reserving funds today for future workers who aren’t even born yet.

The task force report doesn’t recommend ending this pre-funding, yet it proceeds from the premise that the Postal Service must make money. The USPS “is on an unsustainable financial path,” the authors write, with package volumes from e-commerce unable to replace declines in letter mail. To remedy this, the report seeks reforms to the USPS business model.

That includes messing with the universal service obligation. The USPS “must distinguish between the types of mail and packages for which a strong social or macroeconomic rationale exists for government protection in the form of price caps and mandated delivery standards (‘essential services’), versus those types of mail and packages that are commercial in nature, and therefore would not have a basis for government protection,” the task force writes.

In English, that means degrading the universal service obligation. Essential services, as defined by the task force, would include personal correspondence, financial transactions like bill-paying, government mail, and transport of pharmaceuticals. Everything else, like commercial packages, would be inessential, and subject to increased postage rates. This is what’s considered the shot across the bow at Amazon.

But under this standard, the USPS could also discontinue the delivery of “inessential” packages or mail that is unprofitable; the task force calls it “exit[ing] the business line.” Post offices that are costly to maintain could be closed more quickly; the task force wants to give the USPS more “flexibility” in this area. “Speed of processing” mail could be slowed. Saturday delivery could even be stopped.

The task force writes that it “strongly believes that any potential solutions considered should not disadvantage those living in rural or remote locations,” but it seems clear that this would be the effective result of degrading the universal service obligation. Not only would poorer postal customers in rural America bear the brunt of higher rates and slower service on “inessential” deliveries, and less profitable rural post offices targeted for closure, but rural America would also likely be singled out for extra costs. We have the experience of FedEx, which adds a “Delivery Area Surcharge” to harder-to-reach zip codes. The task force report represents a gateway for USPS to do the same thing. To discriminate based on geographic location would grossly undermine the USPS mission to connect all Americans.

The task force’s discussion of how the USPS can raise revenue is likewise wrongheaded. Recommendations include having the agency charge rival shippers for access to post office boxes, and selling hunting and fishing licenses. But it drew the line at postal banking, a proposal for the USPS to give all citizens access to simple bank accounts. “Expanding into sectors where the USPS does not have a comparative advantage or where balance sheet risk might arise, such as postal banking, should not be pursued,” the task force states.

Access to the financial system for the millions of people without a bank account also fits squarely within the USPS mission. The comparative advantage is clear in the breadth of USPS infrastructure, with over 31,000 locations nationwide. This is why the USPS did, in fact, provide simple bank accounts from 1911-1967, and why postal agencies in dozens of countries around the world do so as well.

The task force’s report may not call for outright privatization, but it embraces its logic by prioritizing cost-cutting—even calling for the elimination of collective bargaining for the USPS’ unionized workforce. But that’s not why the country established the Postal Service. It did so to build a cohesive, successful country in which Americans have fair and equal access to each other. Instead of figuring out how to live up to this commitment, the task force would rather undermine it.

The best movie of the year is only playing in few theaters in New York City. Alfonso Cuarón’s intimate yet epic Roma, the story of a young maid and the fracturing family she works for in early-1970s Mexico City, is a sweeping autobiographical film whose pellucid 65mm format and stunning set-pieces demand to be seen on the largest possible screen. And yet, most people in America who see Roma will watch it on their television. Only Netflix would give Cuarón the funding and creative control he needed to make his masterpiece.

Since its inception—but particularly since it pivoted to streaming video in 2007—Netflix has spent billions in pursuit of a single goal: to monopolize as much of its customers’ time as possible. “There are only so many hours of viewer consumption in the world,” The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey wrote earlier this year. “Netflix wants as many of them as possible.” Now, having conquered television and genre filmmaking, it is wading into prestige filmmaking. “Facing rising competition from Walt Disney Co. and other media giants entering the streaming business, Netflix is increasingly eager to lure filmmakers who want their movies to be shown on a big screen and get awards recognition,” The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday.

The movie business is ripe for this type of disruption. Over the last decade, industry consolidation has pressured the major studios to reduce their investment in prestigious, mid-budget movies in favor of more bankable, mega-budget movies—thus the increasing reliance on film franchises like The Avengers and The Fast and the Furious. (In the first three months of this year, Marvel’s Black Panther accounted for a quarter of all ticket sales.) Streaming services are stepping into the void, providing homes for directors who otherwise would have to choose between making superhero films or low-budget Sundance fare. Amazon Studios has already produced a major Oscar winner in 2017’s Manchester By the Sea, and Disney, which owns both Marvel and Star Wars, is unveiling a streaming service next year.

“There’s a lot of discussion around the way the movies are shown, whether or not they have theatrical releases or just go up on the platform,” director Joel Coen, whose The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was available on Netflix just a week after a limited theatrical run, recently told the Times. “But I think the more fundamental thing is that they’re the people who are stepping up and spending money on movies that aren’t Marvel comics movies or big action franchise movies and that type of thing.”

Netflix may seem like a savior to these filmmakers right now, but the promise is illusory. Streaming services are also under tremendous economic pressure of their own, such that they’re unlikely to commit for the long term to arty, mid-budget films like Roma and Buster Scruggs. They may temporarily slow the increasing homogenization of filmmaking in America, but they cannot reverse it.

For filmmakers like Cuarón, these are strange times. There has been a precipitous decline in the number of movies produced by major studios, which have abandoned ambitious and adventurous work—like Cuarón’s 2006 Children of Men, which cost nearly $80 million to produce—and a host of genres, notably adult dramas and romantic comedies. Once upon a time, big studios pumped out relatively expensive Oscar bait—a diverse slate of middle-brow films like As Good as It Gets, Shakespeare in Love, Syriana—while taking risks on more unconventional movies. Blockbuster films were largely confined to the summer. Today, under pressure from the publicly traded multinationals, they’re focusing on expensive but enormously profitable franchises throughout the year.

Enter Netflix, which only began producing original content in 2011. It started with television shows, first the political soap opera House of Cards, before a slate of other diverse offerings—the supernatural nostalgia of Stranger Things, the animated comedy Bojack Horseman, the network-TV ready Adventures of Kimmy Schmidt, and the expensive Queen Elizabeth II biopic The Crown. Over the last five years, Netflix and Amazon have ramped up their movie production, with Netflix first trying its hand at slapdash comedies and genre films (it made a splash by signing Adam Sandler to a four-movie deal in 2014) and Amazon filling a void in independent cinema, producing Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, James Gray’s Lost City of Z, and Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea.

In 2018, Netflix will produce more movies than the six major studios combined. But the company has struggled to get its movies in theaters because it insists on a small window of exclusivity for theaters—or none at all. 2015’s Beasts of No Nation and last year’s Mudbound were released simultaneously in theaters and online, and thus, few theaters chose to carry the films. Roma will premiere on Netflix on December 14, just weeks after its theatrical release; it is showing only in a handful of cities. This strategy hinders Netflix’s ability to woo filmmakers and awards voters. “No filmmaker says, ‘Yeah, I want to make a movie for an iPad.’ They want people to see it on the big screen, and rightly so,” Karie Bible, a box office analyst with Exhibitor Relations, told the Times. “In order for it to be taken seriously by the [motion picture] academy, it has to have a theatrical release.”

But Netflix has won over filmmakers like Cuarón with the promise of money and creative freedom for difficult projects. “We know full well that a Spanish-language drama—indigenous, black and white and not a genre movie—would have a great deal of difficulty to find space to be shown,” he told Deadline earlier this year. “I’m very grateful for Netflix because they have allowed me to work in this way.” Director Paul Greengrass, whose recent film 22 July, about the 2011 Norway terror attacks and their aftermath, was released simultaneously in theaters and online this year, recently praised Netflix for its “tremendous support of difficult films.”

Netflix gave Oscar nominee David Mackenzie the time and freedom to recut the historical epic Outlaw King after it received middling reviews—something a studio almost certainly would have prevented him from doing, given the time pressures facing films with theatrical releases. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that I had a chance to go back in there and not be stuck in a position where the film was rushed for a festival and that was that,” Mackenzie told Indiewire. “That would have been terrible. It feels like a privilege to be able to completely control your own destiny on a film of this scale.”

Finally, Netflix can offer these directors a wide audience. While the company does not release its streaming numbers, Deadline reported that “sources close to” the film 22 July said that it was viewed 14.5 million times. That’s a staggering number of viewers for a difficult film that contains a 30-minute scene in which children are massacred by a white supremacist. Even if the number is somewhat overstated, it’s certainly a larger audience than a movie like 22 July could have attracted with a wide theatrical release.

This artistic independence is partly the result of Netflix’s aforementioned weakness—without much to offer in terms of theatrical distribution, it is leaning into creative freedom. But it’s also the result of its arms race with Amazon and Disney. Netflix announced that it would spend up to $8 billion in 2018 in an attempt to make its library 50 percent original programming in an effort to prevent other digital behemoths from stealing its market share.

These circumstances may not last very long. Netflix is burning through cash in an attempt to ward off competitors, but producing expensive movies with small audiences may eventually seem like not a great investment, regardless of their critical appeal—especially when genre flicks, like the highly successful (and cheap) romantic comedies Set it Up and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, proved to be big hits. Shut out from chain cinemas, Netflix could invest in a costly movie theater business, which would provide another revenue stream for movies like Roma, but that would be a significant leap—perhaps a greater one than Netflix’s pivot from mail-order DVDs to streaming video. (The Times reported that Netflix “considered buying a theater chain such as Landmark Theatres, but backed away from the idea because of the price.”)

Amazon, it seems, is already pivoting away from such movies. Having gained recognition as an Oscar-winning studio, the company has decided to forego $5 million investments in favor of $50 million ones. “Amazon wants programming aimed at a far wider audience as it pursues its central business goal: persuading more people to join its video streaming service and shopping club Prime,” Reuters reported in January. Manchester by the Sea’s two Oscars were nice and all, but what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos really wants is a blockbuster. On the hunt for its own Game of Thrones, Amazon is investing a reported $1 billion in a Lord of the Rings television show.

While Netflix has spent billions to become a streaming service with something for everyone, it’s easy to imagine them making a similar decision as Amazon, abandoning expensive and difficult films in favor of lighter, cheaper indie fare. Netflix is focusing on prestige content to prove the company’s value and long-term viability—to earn its place among the Hollywood elite. But Netflix may lose its luster with distinguished filmmakers when it joins that elite and then is forced to make the same decisions that the major studios have been making for the past decade, sacrificing quality for the bottom line. For now, two Silicon Valley giants are keeping prestigious filmmaking afloat, but not because they care about prestigious filmmaking. It’s part of a broader battle for market share, and ultimately the loser may be the filmmakers themselves.

The women in Idra Novey’s novels—activists, dissidents, and translators of fiction with high ideals—set out to do the right thing. But they often get trapped in the details. What begins as conviction is quickly thwarted by logistical hurdles and self-doubt. The relationship between the self and the rest of the world is a particularly anxious one for these characters: They might ask how they can live with themselves, but they know, guiltily, that the more important question is how we live with other people. How do we balance our responsibility to others with our own commitments?

Few contemporary fiction writers have depicted this fraught state more effortlessly (or less obnoxiously) than Idra Novey. Set in an “aging port city” in an unnamed island nation, her new novel, Those Who Knew, unfolds during the early years of its democracy, “near the start of the new millennium.” It centers on Lena, a teacher in her thirties who has been (mildly) estranged from her wealthy, factory-owning family for more than ten years. When the island was under authoritarian rule, they supported and profited from the regime. She “invented sleepovers to study with girlfriends,” when really she was staying out all night planning protests with her boyfriend, Victor—a magnetic, serious, and scary figure. He has since become a beloved progressive senator, campaigning against the corruption that has plagued the young government, and taking advantage of it himself.

Lena’s activist years illuminate how easily self-interest can blur with political purpose, a central tension of the book: When Victor put her in charge of flyers for a march, it felt “like a baptism.” When he told her to be “more brazen”—her family could always bail her out—she responded by “throwing more Molotovs than all of the other girls combined.” If the Molotovs are being thrown righteously, what does it matter if the person throwing them is doing so out of guilt, or to impress a man? That question gets a little more difficult when we consider the particular man: Although they weren’t together long, Victor and Lena both still think about the relationship more than a decade later. He does because he has struggled to re-create the intensity of their intertwined political and romantic lives with each subsequent beautiful young girlfriend, and she does because he almost choked her to death in his basement.

Despite the book’s brevity—its 256 pages contain a lot of blank space and, according to a publisher’s note, clock in at less than 60,000 words—it deftly encompasses a sweeping time frame and impressive range of points of view. Though it’s packaged as a kind of literary thriller, the narrative spreads outward in many directions, becoming ever more diffuse and irresolvable. Short, third-person sections alternate with snippets of plays, newspaper articles, and the transaction log of a crumbling communist bookstore/marijuana outfit addressed to the owner’s dead lover. Novey wants to draw out the prejudices, fears, and desires that are bound up with political impulses—to see whether an individual can ever untangle those knots.

The novel begins with Lena receiving what she believes to be a message from one of those subsequent beautiful young girlfriends, Maria P., when she finds a sweater that doesn’t belong to her inside her tote bag. With “a white zigzag” across the front “like the pulse line on a heart monitor,” the sweater looks a lot like one Lena used to wear in college, in an era that shaped “the pivotal aspect of who she was.” It also looks like the sweater that Maria P. is wearing in the photo alongside her obituary. Or maybe not exactly like that one, but very similar. A week before the sweater appeared in Lena’s bag, Maria’s death had been declared an accident—she had walked, drunk, in front of a bus.

This opening suggests the narrative will follow Lena’s inquiries into Maria’s death, as she determines whether the younger woman was, in fact, pushed. Another photograph gives Lena a bad feeling: a picture in which Maria can be seen beaming at Victor. Putting these clues and her own past experience together, Lena frantically goes to her friend Olga, a former political exile and current owner of the now-legal communist bookshop Sublime (full name: Seek the Sublime or Die). She tells Olga she’s certain the death was no accident. “I could go to the police right now,” she insists:

I drank at the Minnow in my student days. I know that curve on Trinity Hill where she was killed. I could describe it, how I was walking up Trinity that night and saw Victor push her in front of that bus.

She wants to protect other women from Victor, but she quickly realizes that coming forward with her accusations, particularly with her background, would cause problems for herself without effecting much change. Besides, she certainly had not, Olga points out, gently but sassily, actually seen Victor push the student in front of the bus.

Meanwhile, we learn (but Lena doesn’t), that in the days following Maria’s death Victor has proposed marriage to another woman—wealthy, whose father is also a senator—in order to quash any talk of his involvement with Maria. (Though Maria had promised not to tell anyone about their affair, she nevertheless “was a girl, and girls were feline, always purring up to one another with their secrets.”) Lena, it seems, is onto something. But the sense of mystery the novel goes on to evoke is not the result of clever contrivances in the plot. Instead, through steady pacing and delicate representation of the ways people circle around the truth, Novey creates an atmosphere of uncertainty. She is less concerned with what actually happens—though she knows we can, like Lena, imagine—than with the ways people try to approach it and respond.

This is best illustrated in the most dramatic confrontation in the book. Attending a play written by Victor’s flamboyant younger brother, Freddy, Lena sees Victor across the room and decides to yell the name Maria; when she confronts him, he forcefully grabs her wrist. Rather than present this in traditional narration, Novey includes it as a scene from The Pruning of a Future Presidential Candidate, a work-in-progress by Freddy. (Freddy’s use of their family’s story in his work makes Victor more than uncomfortable: At one point, he calls the fictions “libelous.”) We only learn that the scene truly happened—such as things truly happen in fiction—much later, when Cristina, the new fiancée on Victor’s arm at the show, remembers it resentfully. Gossip, wishful thinking, speculation, fantasy, memory, fiction, art: When corruption is blatant, hypocrisy unchallenged, and power obviously unattainable, Novey suggests, these are the tools people use to comprehend the world.

When Novey’s women find they can’t trust their own judgment, they spiral into a crisis. Her first novel, Ways to Disappear, is similar in structure to Those Who Knew, composed of short narrated sections, text from radio broadcasts, dictionary entries, and emails. It, too, focuses on a woman pursuing a quest that is urgent but also vague and confusing to her: A professor and translator, Emma Neufeld flees her mostly comfortable life and fiancé in Pittsburgh to travel to Rio when she learns the author whose work she’s devotedly translated for years, Beatriz Yagoda, has climbed into an almond tree with a suitcase and cigar and vanished. As in Those Who Knew, an intriguing magical realist beginning gives way to practical concerns: A loan shark threatens, and though Beatriz’s two adult children knew of previous gambling debts, the author’s laptop reveals negative sums that even their wealthy aunts in São Paolo can’t be asked to cover.

While Emma starts out confident that her deep knowledge of Beatriz’s work will yield clues to the author’s whereabouts, she’s quickly deflated. Traveling to significant locations in Beatriz’s fiction—accompanied by her gorgeous adult son, who soon becomes Emma’s lover—only leaves Emma with a horrific sunburn. She finds she’s been too straightforward, too literal in her approach to both her author’s work and her own life; she’s missing a sense of ingenuity and risk. On a previous trip to Brazil, Emma “confessed she hadn’t been quite as dutiful in her last translation as in Beatriz’s earlier books, and Beatriz had replied that duty was for clergy. For translation to be art,” the author told her, “you have to make the uncomfortable but necessary transgressions that an artist makes.”

Now, indeed, Emma feels she’s transgressed by showing up to help with the search without being asked: She worries that “in coming to Brazil in her author’s absence, she had put herself on trial.” Standing in her author’s bathroom, leaving her own hair in her author’s hairbrush, Emma begins to imagine herself in a courtroom: Dozens of spectators were squinting at her.... Her hands and arms had turned hazy at the edges.... Yet everyone in the gallery … could see her, or at least found her legible enough to be tried for her alleged crimes.

A translator’s failure to be “present but invisible” is of course not an actual crime, but Emma’s sense of transgression—like Lena’s guilt at not having blown the whistle on Victor’s abuses—feels like the only available response to the impasse she’s reached. She is only confident that she can’t be confident about anything. Both she and Lena feel they must do something with their knowledge, even as they realize that knowledge is elusive and anyway does not bring much power at all.

Of course, faced with problems borne of vast, intricate political systems, hand-wringing is not much use either. In this, Novey might present a bleak vision of the world, but she also allows her characters to carve out spaces for resistance, and even to build a life outside politics. This is also probably why, despite the suffering she depicts on many levels, both novels have endings that are, if not happy, at least partially optimistic. If her characters can’t enact the justice they want, they’re still able to respond to their circumstances in their personal lives, difficult as that may sometimes be.

Most of the characters in Those Who Knew have learned to read power, and their happiness is related partly to their willingness, or not, to ignore it. Olga keeps her bookstore afloat by dealing pot on the side, and she smokes a lot of it to cope with the loss of the “love of her life,” who was disappeared by the regime years before; there’s also an entire section of the shop labeled conspiracy, targeted to “earnest-faced young northerners”— Novey leaves little doubt that they are Americans—who backpack across the island hoping to pick up souvenirs in the form of disintegrating volumes of Trotsky and Marx dug up from people’s backyards once they were legal to own again.

Lena begins an affair with one of these northerners, a very blond baker named Oscar, but their tender, promising romance is cut short when they wake up one morning to the news of “the attack.” On television they watch “a fuzzy feed of an immense, distant building, the upper half of it in flames. Beside it, another structure was engulfed in smoke.” Oscar’s incredulity—“This sort of incomprehensible thing didn’t happen in his country”—annoys Lena, though of course she’s always been insulated from political incomprehensibility, too.

When he asks how she could eat while they watch the towers collapse, only to stare at her breasts moments later, she flies into a rage at his uneven sensitivities: “I can’t eat because your city is the one on fire for once but you can stare at my chest because you’re the northerner and you get to set the rules for everyone.” He claims he’s traveled to the island to understand what his government did there; she wonders if that involves “screwing women who are supposed to feel grateful and lucky when you show up with dinner for them?” They don’t see each other again for years, and when they do, Lena commits what could be considered either a betrayal or an act of mercy, depending on which of them you believe has the power.

And then there’s Victor, the revered progressive, campaigning to eliminate tuition and improve the island’s schools, among other valiant causes. Even if we never learn, for sure, what happened with Maria, it is clear that he’s a violent misogynist, who relishes manipulating women. (He prefers women, he says, with “ideas of their own, ideas they were hungry for him to hear and respond to” so that he can be “the one to dispense the sentence or two of affirmation they were after, and gauge what might happen after that.”) But that doesn’t mean he sees justice. Within the morass of the personal and political that Novey depicts, there are certain dead ends. One of Novey’s more direct statements on this concerns Victor’s eventual fate: Though Lena continues to feel guilt for her “passive role” in the suffering he’s inflicted, his ultimate comeuppance, after a long downward spiral, is related not to his abuse of women, but to a crime he commits against a man.

George H. W. Bush, who died on December 1, is remembered more for his influence on world events than for his domestic policies. That may be an inevitable byproduct of serving as president during the end of the Cold War and organizing the international coalition in the Gulf War. But Bush had a profound impact on American life that endures to this day—indeed, that affects citizens every day—through just two consequential decisions.

Bush filled a pair of vacancies on the Supreme Court during his single term in office: first by nominating David Souter to replace William Brennan in 1990, then picking Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall in 1991. Brennan’s and Marshall’s retirements marked a turning point in the court’s history. They were the last liberal justices of the Warren Court, which bent American history in a more progressive direction during the 1950s and 1960s. With their departures, Bush had a chance to cap the conservative legal movement’s reconquest of the Supreme Court.

But Bush inadvertently placed that goal out of reach for a generation by choosing Souter, who turned out to be a liberal justice. Souter’s presence ensured that Roe v. Wade would remain the law of the land for at least a quarter-century and helped guarantee that a reliable conservative majority would not emerge until this year. Thomas’s nomination thrilled conservatives, but the battle to place him on the court amid sexual-harassment allegations set the stage for more partisan judicial confirmation battles in the years to come. Bush’s nominations changed not only the court itself, but also its place in American politics and civic life.

Supreme Court justices can be a major feather in any president’s cap. For one-term presidents, the significance can be even greater. Gerald Ford filled a single vacancy on the court during his three-year presidency, nominating John Paul Stevens, a Midwesterner judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, to replace William O. Douglas in 1975. Stevens began his tenure on the court—the third-longest in its history—as a centrist, amenable at first to the Burger Court’s rightward drift after the Warren years. He retired in 2010 as the dean of the liberal justices.

Ford, a Republican, nonetheless did not regret his decision. In a letter to USA Today written a few months before his death in 2005, he noted that great justices were not typically counted among a president’s achievements. “Eisenhower’s Earl Warren, John Adams’ John Marshall and Wilson’s Louis Brandeis immediately come to mind; although references to these great jurists are usually absent in presidential biographies,” he wrote. “Let that not be the case with my presidency. For I am prepared to allow history’s judgment of my term in office to rest (if necessary, exclusively) on my nomination thirty years ago of Justice John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Other presidents weren’t as fortunate. Jimmy Carter served a full four-year term after defeating Ford in 1976, but no vacancies emerged, making Carter the only president in the twentieth century to name no justices to the high court. This is not to Carter’s discredit; it wasn’t up to him. But the circumstances still produced a remarkable quarter-century of conservative influence over the court’s trajectory. After Lyndon B. Johnson’s appointment of Thurgood Marshall in 1968 and until Bill Clinton’s appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993, Republican presidents placed eleven justices on the high court.

Some of those justices, such as William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, were reliable conservative votes on the court. Others, like Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, were generally conservative but not doctrinaire about it. Bush’s selection of Souter was meant to fall in the reliable column. Souter, a patrician New Englander like Bush, was not a member of the conservative legal movement. He did not travel in Federalist Society circles, nor did he identify as a particularly conservative jurist, though the Bush White House vouched for him to conservative activists.

Bush and his aides were ultimately wrong. Within a few years, Souter had become a reliable vote for the court’s liberal wing. A key turning point came in 1993, when the court heard Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Four of the court’s members, including Thomas, had signaled in previous cases that they would overturn Roe v. Wade if given the opportunity. The nation expected in Casey that they, plus a fifth vote, would swing the axe. Instead, justices Kennedy, O’Connor, and Souter forged a compromise that upheld Roe’s core ruling—that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to obtain an abortion—while imposing a new test to determine whether abortion restrictions posed an “undue burden” to that right.

Roe’s survival in Casey was a jarring defeat for the conservative legal movement, one that led them to rethink their approach to judicial nominations. No longer would right-wing activists take the White House’s word on a nominee’s ideological fitness. Supreme Court justices selected by Republican presidents now have to meet the advice-and-consent requirement twice: first from the conservative intelligentsia, and then from the Senate. Harriet Miers, a George W. Bush loyalist without ties to the movement, failed the test and withdrew from consideration in 2005. John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh passed it with flying colors.

Bush’s selection of Thomas proved to be just as influential. Thomas was no Souter; by any measurement, he ranks among the most conservative jurists to serve on the Supreme Court in a quarter-century. His replacement of Marshall also produced one of the largest ideological swings for a single seat in the court’s modern history. The story of Supreme Court nominations is a story of what-ifs, and Marshall’s retirement is perhaps the most poignant of all for liberals: The civil-rights icon died two years after he retired on January 23, 1999—three days after Bill Clinton’s inauguration. Had Clinton chosen his successor, Bush v. Gore may have been decided differently, and the last two decades of American history would be unrecognizable.

Just as significant as Thomas’s elevation to the court was the fight to place him there. Contentious Supreme Court confirmation battles weren’t novel in 1991, of course. Thomas’s nomination came only four years after the Senate rejected Ronald Reagan’s selection of Robert Bork, a prominent conservative scholar whose views gave Democrats plenty of ammunition to sink his nomination. Thomas made it through his initial confirmation hearings without major problems. Then came the reports that he had sexually harassed Anita Hill when working as her supervisor at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the early 1980s.

Bush stood by his nominee when the allegations became public. “I’ve got strong feelings, but they all end up in support for Clarence Thomas,” he told reporters when the Senate Judiciary Committee announced it would call Thomas and Hill to testify on the matter. Those hearings transformed sexual harassment in the workplace into a national topic of discussion after years in the shadows. The hostile and dismissive treatment of Hill by an all-male panel of senators led to a record number of women candidates elected to Congress in the 1992 elections. Its impact still reverberates: Any history of the #MeToo movement begins with Anita Hill.

These days, presidents are more aware that the Supreme Court nominees they choose will be major parts of their legacy. Perhaps no president is more keenly aware of this than the current one. Donald Trump often bragged about his selections of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to crowds of supporters during the 2018 campaigns. His future in the Oval Office is far from certain: Assuming he isn’t impeached in the next two years, his dismal poll numbers don’t bode well for a re-election bid in 2020. (Then again, they didn’t bode well for his election bid in 2016, either.) No matter his ultimate fate, however, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will remain on the court for at least a generation, ensuring that Trump’s impact on American life will long outlive him.