Republicans have cemented their conservative majority on the Supreme Court with Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation by the Senate on Monday.
The vote was divided along party lines, with 52 Republicans voting in favor and 48 Democrats against her nomination.
Now, several major issues could be at stake, says Katherine Grainger, partner at Civitas Public Affairs Group — "everything from the voting rights act to the Affordable Care Act, which gives health insurance to 21 million people in this country."
Grainger is also concerned about American women losing abortion rights.
"There are 17 cases in the pipeline around reproductive health that could get to the court this year," she said. "We know that part of the strategy around a conservative court is to try to reverse Roe versus Wade."
That landmark ruling has been around for nearly half a century, but liberals worry it could now be overturned. In fact, the Supreme Court has overruled almost 300 of its own decisions since its inception.
Grainger says that should the court go that far, there would be "revolt."
"I think we are seeing now a population that is tired of oppression," she said. "We're seeing that with the racial justice uprisings. I think we'd see something very similar around Roe."
Roe has been challenged several times, and Barrett's mentor, Justice Antonin Scalia, was in favor of overturning it, his son Christopher Scalia told Business Insider.
"My father thought that the Supreme Court had no business declaring that that was a constitutional right when the Constitution is silent on abortion," he said. "So my father's point wasn't that abortion should be banned nationally. My father's point was that the Constitution is silent on that, meaning it's left in the hands of states to make those decisions."
Justice Antonin Scalia was on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who fought for women's rights. But at the end of the day, they were still good friends. Scalia's son says that if that collegiality is lost the court will suffer.
"I don't know that it necessarily means that opinions will suddenly be shoddy or anything like that," he said. "But I think that one of the things that sets the court apart is that collegiality. And I think that one of the reasons Americans trust the Supreme Court and the judicial branch generally more than the other branches of government is because they sense that collegiality.
But Grainger says that with Republicans rushing Barrett to the bench just weeks after Ginsburg's death, the court has already taken a political turn.
"I am a lawyer who believes in the courts and believes in the history of the court of how it has protected and advanced rights for oppressed people," she said. "But I do think now it's very hard to ignore that the court is becoming a political body."
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