Hillary Clinton's campaign has made clear perhaps the most important way that America's choice for president in 2016 will have a profound effect for good or for ill on the health of our democracy: the next president's Supreme Court nominees.

As reported in Bloomberg, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta noted the importance of Supreme Court nominations during an interview with PBS's Charlie Rose yesterday:

"What she's out there doing is saying that we need to clean up financial—the campaign finance. Just listen to the voices of everyday Americans to, you know, move forward, and if it takes a constitutional amendment, so be it. I think the first thing that she'll do, quite frankly—and that this will set her apart from her Republican opponents—is that she'll appoint Supreme Court justices who protect the right of every American to vote, not every corporation to buy an election."

The Roberts Court's devastating campaign finance rulings like Citizens United have all been 5-4. It is that one-vote margin that gave corporations the ability to pour unlimited amounts of dark money into influencing our elections, that has tossed out common-sense efforts to restore the voices of those who are not among the nation's financial elite, and that has ramped up the ability of millionaires and billionaires to give even more money directly to parties and campaigns.

But those recent cases are sharp departures from the Court's previous jurisprudence on the First Amendment, and it could take only one new Supreme Court Justice to overrule them.

Similarly, the rampant assault on voting rights we have seen in recent years can be traced back to bad rulings in Shelby County (gutting the Voting Rights Act) and Crawford (okaying restrictive photo ID requirements to vote). We can be sure that more challenges to the right to vote will make their way to the Supreme Court, and it is critical that we have Justices who understand the importance of protecting that right.

Three of the current Justices will be 80 or older by the time the next president is inaugurated, and a fourth will turn 80 in 2018. The next president may have one or more opportunities to change the Court, either to strengthen the current hard-right majority for a generation or more, or to restore a Court that we can rely on to protect our rights and our democracy.