Yeah, that’s why my post mentions William O. Douglas and Potter Stewart retiring under Carter, as well as Thurgood Marshall holding out until Clinton is inagurated, because otherwise there’s no true way to truly stop judicial conservative overreach other than retroactively changing electoral results every time a change in the judiciary comes up, which is just permanently chasing your own tail.
Basically, you can’t truly avoid organizations like the federalist society, and the more you marginalize conservatism on the court, the more extreme they’ll get, at least in a vacuum and with no pushback. However you can do two things: win elections! (Much easier said than done, but there’s a reason I highlighted that any of the original three PoDs would flip Bush v. Gore and butterfly Alito.)
The other option is pushback! That when you have the rare Republican president (though just implement the national popular vote and you eliminate that problem too), make it clear that Democrats will raise Hell on Earth if they try to pick the modern day Bork, as Leahy threatened to hold open Powell’s seat until after the 1988. Best case scenario, a Democrat wins, worst case scenario, HW wins, so you get a less extremist Justice (on paper, though spite can be a powerful motivator so he could just spam Bork/Thomas-like candidates, though then you could just pull a McConnell and threaten to hold the seat open for the four whole years.)
The thing is, and I had this argument on the other thread, centrism is nonpartisan, and Democrats, especially if they stayed on the Clinton/Gore Third Way DLC triangulator path will (on paper) pick more conservative/moderate justices (though Hufstedler for Carter and Mario Cuomo/Laurence Tribe/RBG for Clinton say otherwise). Other than that, centrism will shift with the times (after all, 7-2 on Dred Scott means that at least the idea of Scott not deserving freedom was the “centrist/moderate” position).
At the end of the day, ideally (and admittedly self servingly as a progressive), just pick the furthest left justices you can, and after they serve 2-3 decades on the court, they’ll be centrists or even outright conservatives compared to where the country is. (Basically, conservatives can roll with the punches of a liberal SC, after all, who doesn’t like more rights? Rolling with the punches of a conservative SC is much more hard, especially when they outright strip previously guaranteed rights, and as such, it’s much better to avoid their dominance in the first place.)
(For my point, see Dred Scott, Plessy, Civil Rights Cases, Slaughterhouse, and Cruikshank, amongst others.)