The U.S. Supreme Court’s docket this term again has the potential to radically change our nation – and not for the better.

Last term, the Supremes wreaked havoc on women’s lives – as well as their entire families’ -- by overturning Roe v. Wade and abolishing a woman’s right to choose. Though Justice Samuel Alito’s draft of his Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion had leaked well before, the upending of a woman’s constitutional right to bodily autonomy still stunned much of the nation.

One of the most astute and knowledgeable writers to grapple with this harsh news is Linda Greenhouse, who covered the U.S. Supreme Court for The New York Times over more than four decades. She wrote a powerful piece, “Requiem for the Supreme Court,” laying out the likely destruction to come.

It’s now coming – yet there could be so much more ahead. The Supremes look ready to slash and burn more components of the Voting Rights Act and allow state legislatures to overturn voters’ election decisions. The court’s rampant, six-person conservative majority could even decide to end same-sex marriage or take on contraception.

A smart look at what President Joe Biden could do about this is offered by Jeff Shesol, a former presidential speechwriter who wrote “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court,” the definitive book about FDR’s efforts to pack the Supreme Court in 1937.

That plan to increase the size of the court has long been viewed as a grave misstep by one of America’s most sure-footed presidents. Yet Shesol’s piece explains why Biden must follow some of the same steps to best respond to the Supremes’ impending actions. Biden, Shesol asserts, must change the national conversation about the Supreme Court and what it is doing.

Roosevelt focused public outrage as the Supreme Court’s conservative justices kept striking down vital New Deal programs. He slammed the hidebound, older justices as out-of-step with the times – the Great Depression, FDR insisted, required extraordinary measures. Ultimately, Roosevelt was able to shift the attitudes of elected officials, and even the judiciary itself.

Biden, Shesol demands, must do the same today. The president should stop sitting on the sidelines, as a bystander, and begin leading the public debate about the serious problems created by the current Supremes.

After all, FDR knew a thing or two about shaping national politics.