D.A. King, the head of an Atlanta-area group that opposes illegal immigration, heard word of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s retirementwhile vacationing on St. Simons Island, off the Georgia coast. He was elated thinking of the conservative who might replace him.

Kristen Clarke, a civil rights lawyer, heard the news on the radio not far from the Supreme Court itself, as she was driving to a Capitol Hill hearing about the Voting Rights Act. She figured her job defending voting rights was about to become much more of a challenge.

In West Hollywood, Curtis Collins was working out at Barry’s Bootcamp, and he said the Supreme Court justice’s announcement dominated the Wednesday afternoon conversation among the predominantly gay group of men exercising there. “Everybody was talking about it, how appalling it was,” he said. “Everyone was saying they were scared. We don’t normally talk about politics in there.”

It is not exactly shocking when an 81-year-old man decides to retire after 30 years on the job. And yet, Justice Kennedy’s announcement this week still managed to deliver a powerful jolt to the nation. His departure comes at a fragile time for the country, as a first-term president has vigorously assumed the role of disrupter-in-chief. President Trump said he wanted to pick a jurist who could serve at least 40 years on the court, potentially cementing the president’s impact on the country for generations.

For many liberals, the departure was almost too much to bear, particularly after a month in which they were disappointed by Supreme Court rulings that, among other things, narrowly upheld Mr. Trump’s travel ban, curtailed union power, and let stand a plan to purge state voter rolls in Ohio.

“We are so much more screwed today than we were yesterday, and we were pretty screwed yesterday,” said Monica Russo, a 41-year-old stay at home mother on Long Island, who had just put her daughter down for a nap when she saw the news on Twitter.

Coming on the heels of Tuesday’s decision upholding the travel ban, Ms. Russo felt overwhelmed.

“My stomach dropped,” she said. “I know that Trump is hellbent on replacing any justice with somebody who would be a threat to reproductive rights. It makes me want to do anything that I can to make sure that everybody knows the importance of voting in November.”

Americans of all political persuasions are now bracing for what is likely to be an incendiary confirmation battle, and pondering what effect a newly constituted court will have on longstanding issues, like abortion, and more recent controversies, like immigration, that Mr. Trump has stoked.

Mr. King, eagerly awaiting who will move into Mr. Kennedy’s office, is a well-known and influential activist in Georgia whose flavor of anti-illegal immigrant activism prefigured that of Mr. Trump: He is president of a group called The Dustin Inman Society, named for a teenage boy killed in 2000 in a wreck with an undocumented immigrant driver…Read the rest here.