WASHINGTON, DC — The Voting Rights Act did not have a very good day today. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that a key provision of the law is rooted in the idea that “citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North.” Justice Antonin Scalia accomplished the unusual task of making Roberts look like a moderate by labeling the law a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose undeserved reputation as a moderate leads Court-watchers to pay particularly close attention to his questions, compared a landmark voting rights provision to the Marshall Plan as an example of a good idea that has now run its course.

Nothing, of course, is certain after an oral argument. Arguments in the Affordable Care Act case did not go well for the law or the Constitution, but Roberts ultimately blinked and voted to uphold the lion’s share of the law. When the same provision of the Voting Right Act — the provision requiring some parts of the country to “pre-clear” new voting laws with the Justice Department or a federal court before they take effect — was before the justices four years ago, that argument did not go very well either. Yet the justices ultimately upheld the law, albeit under circumstances suggesting another shoe would drop soon.

Though the shoe seems likely to drop this term, the four Democratic appointees made it clear they would not allow it to fall lightly. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was a star today, demonstrating a masterful understanding of the record and of the history of voter suppression in the South. When Scalia uttered his offensive claim that the law is a racial entitlement program, Sotomayor placed the lawyer challenging voting rights in the uncomfortable position of having to explain whether he agreed or disagreed with Scalia. With an assist from Justice Elena Kagan, Sotomayor pointed out that the plaintiff in this case, Shelby County, Alabama, “may be the wrong party bringing this” because of their dismal past record on voting rights. Alabama as a whole ranks as one of the worst offenders of federal voting rights laws in the country, and thus, as Kagan pointed out, should be subject to additional review of its voting laws “under any formula that Congress could devise.”

Sotomayor also asked the best question of the morning: why should Shelby County be allowed to bring this lawsuit as what is known as a “facial challenge,” instead of a much more limited “as-applied” challenge. A facial challenge is a broad lawsuit claiming that a law must utterly cease to exist and can never be applied to anyone. As Sotomayor pointed out, they are also disfavored under current law (or, a least, that Supreme Court likes to say they are disfavored). Generally, the Supreme Court claims to prefer narrower “as-applied” challenges that claim a law is invalid with respect to a specific plaintiff, but that it may still lawfully be applied to many other parties.

When individual voters bring lawsuits claiming disenfranchisement, the Roberts Court has wielded this distinction between facial and as-applied challenges to devastating effect. Most significantly, in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a plurality of the Court established that challenges to voter ID, a common voter suppression law, can only be brought on an as-applied basis. The upside of this is that each voter who feels they may be disenfranchised by the law has to hire a lawyer, go to court, and sue for the right to vote. And if they win, their victory applies only to them, not to the potentially hundreds of thousands of other voters who could be disenfranchised by voter ID.

What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. If a voter disenfranchisement scheme that is popular with conservatives can only be subject to narrow, plaintiff-specific challenges, than the same rule should apply when a landmark voting rights law is challenged by conservatives. There was little doubt after oral argument today, however, that at least four of the Court’s conservatives do not see it that way.

The thin ray of hope is Justice Kennedy. Although Kennedy’s comments were largely hostile to the law, he did at one point join into the more progressive justices’ questions about whether Shelby County can try to destroy this law entirely — “if you would be covered under any formula, why are you injured under this one?” Kennedy asked the lawyer for Shelby County at one point. Suggesting either that he could ultimately agree with Sotomayor, or at least that he does not think that Shelby County is the right plaintiff to bring this case.

Nevertheless, if Kennedy does not agree with Sotomayor — or at least to put off the fate of the law until a future date — it will mean that there is one rule that applies to individual voters, and another, more favorable rule that applies to people who oppose voting rights.

For the second time this year, Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared on Sesame Street. Yet while her first appearance provided fairly tame moral guidance to the show’s young viewers — that there are two sides to every case and that people should work together to solve their disagreements — her latest trip to Sesame Street provides far more of a window into the justice’s life and the kind of America she aspires to live in.

Strong egalitarian and feminist notes underlie Sotomayor’s appearance, which is framed as a conversation between the nation’s first Latina justice and the child fairy character Abby Cadabby about what it means to have a career. When Abby asks Sotomayor “what kind of job can a girl like me have?” Sotomayor responds that she can “go to school and train to be a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer and even a scientist.” Yet the most important exchange comes when Abby initially tells the justice that she “wants a career as a princess.” No, Sotomayor explains, a career is a job that you “train for and prepare for, and plan on doing for a long time.” Watch it:

A person cannot earn royalty — they can only be born or marry into it. Sotomayor’s dialogue with Abby is a reminder that we do not live in that country. Or, at least, that America aspires to be far more. The fact that it comes less that a week after America narrowly chose a self-made man over the millionaire CEO former governor son of a millionaire CEO former governor makes this reminder all the more important.

Yet Sotomayor’s trip to Sesame Street is also more personal. As a child growing up in a Bronx housing project, the young Sotomayor was as far as one can be from being a princess. Yet she became one of the most accomplished and powerful people in the country because, in her own words, she “went to school and studied long and then became a judge.”

This is, of course, an oversimplification. No one becomes a federal judge, much less a Supreme Court justice, without a deep understanding of politics, powerful benefactors, and a good deal of luck. Sotomayor also glosses over many of the sad realities of our education system, where a child who grows up in a poor school district too often enters adulthood at a disadvantage no matter now hard they focused on their studies. Indeed, Sotomayor herself had to spend her summers “reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and ‘re-teaching’ herself to write ‘proper English’ by reading elementary grammar books” even after she matriculated at Princeton University. Her predecessors on the Supreme Court bear much of the blame for these inequalities, and it may someday fall upon Sotomayor and four of her colleagues to fix them.

So her advice to Abby is more aspirational than it is a comprehensive guide to how a child watching PBS today can be a Supreme Court justice when they grow up, but it is also a far more powerful message for the child growing up in the south Bronx today than the “work out your differences” message of her first Sesame Street appearance. The children left to languish in inadequate schools by the forty year old decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, which ruled that poor children are not constitutionally entitled to the same education as rich children, can do little now to fix the systemic injustices that plague our education system. Nevertheless, Sotomayor is telling those children that every time they aim high and study hard, they choose an America where you do not have to be a princess to be prominent — and that they should decide now to do their part in building that country.

Until five members of her Court are willing to reconsider Rodriguez, that may be the best that she can offer them.

In 2009, when President Obama was close to the height of his popularity and political capital, only nine Republican senators voted to confirm Justice Sotomayor: Lamar Alexander, Kit Bond, Susan Collins, Lindsay Graham, Judd Gregg, Dick Lugar, Mel Martinez, Olympia Snowe, and George Voinovich. Of these four (Bond, Gregg, Martinez and Voinovich) are now retired. One (Snowe) recently announced her voluntary retirement. And one, Dick Lugar of Indiana, was just involuntarily retired by Tea Party challenger Richard Mourdock.

Lugar is an Indiana institution. He ran virtually unopposed during his last reelection race, and won by more than 30 points the last time a major party candidate tried to challenge him. Had he won yesterday’s primary, he would have been the prohibitive favorite in November (Mourdock, by contrast, could lose in November as easily as he could win). Nor was Lugar particularly moderate. Among other things, Lugar voted for Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) infamous plan to phase out Medicare.

In the age of the Tea Party, however, even the most occasional departures from conservative orthodoxy are enough for the GOP electorate to declare a public official an apostate. Mourdock made Lugar’s votes for Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, in addition to a handful of other breaks with America’s far right, the focus of his campaign — and that was enough to defeat a 36 year Senate veteran. In light of this incident, it is unlikely that any of the few remaining Republicans who backed an Obama Supreme Court appointee will be willing to risk their careers by doing the same again.

Lest there be any doubt, there is probably no one President Obama could nominate for the high Court who would satisfy the newly radicalized Republican Party. Mourdock, for his part, recently promised to oppose any nominee who did not fit his personal constitutional philosophy — and he twice cited failed Supreme Court nominee and Romney legal advisor Robert Bork as his model nominee. As recently as last October, Bork mocked the very idea that women sometimes face discrimination as “silly,” and he infamously described the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters as “unsurpassed ugliness” early in his career. Obama would never, ever nominate such a man to the Supreme Court.

In other words, if President Obama has the opportunity to nominate a new justice during a second presidential term, it is tough to imagine any set of circumstances that allows that nominee to receive the 60 votes necessary to break a filibuster. The parties are too far apart. The Republicans are too eager to obstruct, and the handful of GOPers with a history of bipartisanship will be too spooked to reach across the aisle. America could go years with one or more Supreme Court seats vacant.

There could be, however, a way out of this trap. In his most recent State of the Union Address, President Obama called on the Senate to “pass a simple rule that all judicial and public servant nominations receive an up or down vote within 90 days” — effectively eliminating the filibuster for Senate-confirmed jobs. Moreover, when the newly-elected Senate reconvenes next January, it opens a very brief window where Obama’s proposed rule could be implemented with just 51 votes.

Should the Democrats manage to hold the Senate next year, an outcome that is much more likely than appeared possible just one year ago, they no longer have the option to maintain the status quo. Keeping the current rules means stripping Obama of his power to nominate Supreme Court justices, and potentially turning the Court over to Mourdock’s fellow ideologues for years to come.