You can thank one liberal pipe dream and one overly cautious Justice Department.

“It’s up to the Supreme Court.” These days the phrase is as much a statement of fact when it comes to a major legal issue that the justices will resolve as it is a cause for concern. After all, in the past two years alone, the conservative supermajority of justices installed by Donald Trump has upended the law on abortion, gun control, voting rights, affirmative action, executive power, and discrimination in public life.

The same group of justices is now poised to consider two major legal questions that will significantly shape — and perhaps even indirectly determine — the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. The Court’s handling of these issues will constitute a roiling, monthslong subplot of the 2024 presidential contest, one that remains, according to recent polling, a statistical dead heat between Trump and President Joe Biden and couldplausibly turn on the progress of Trump’s criminal cases before Election Day.

It is an unsettling, if not outright maddening, situation that should concern anyone who has watched the politicization and deterioration of the Court in recent years or who recalls its intervention in the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. The uncertainty before us is the result of two ostensibly different problems that are converging before our eyes: the emergence of a solidly conservative majority on the Supreme Court, whose decisions often align with the partisan political priorities of the Republican Party, and the Justice Department’s needless delay in moving to investigate and prosecute Trump over his effort to steal the 2020 election.