This article conceptualizes constitutional court (dis)empowerment as a process impacting constitutional court resilience. It introduces a two-dimensional typology of mechanisms of exogenous and endogenous empowerment and disempowerment that points to the centrality of judicial and broader political community agency to an extent independent from formal competences of the constitutional court. Subsequently, the article explores the applicability of the four mechanisms in the case of the Slovak Constitutional Court. In Slovakia, the success of an illiberal majority in the 2023 general elections amplified concerns over the Constitutional Court’s capacity to resist de-democratization. These concerns spread despite Slovakia having overcome a period of semi authoritarian regime in 1994–1998, whereby the formally powerful Constitutional Court was seen as a pivotal institution contributing to such an outcome. The Slovak political development yields lessons for constitutional court resilience amidst de-democratization. Proposing a combination of research methods (contextual analysis and insights from semistructured interviews) for collecting and analyzing empirical data to study the four mechanisms, the article emphasizes endogenous disempowerment as the least studied mechanism so far. The findings highlight several gradually self-imposed limits by the Slovak Constitutional Court, that may be amplified due to its continuing – albeit decreasing – degree of closedness to international and non-doctrinal scrutiny. Ultimately, the pivotal cases reaching the Court after the 2023 elections due to the attempts of power concentration by the illiberal majority show indications of a critical juncture testing the SCC’s resilience.