Democrats wasted no time in responding to Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. On Monday night, while Trump was still speaking in the East Room of the White House, Brian Fallon, Hillary Clinton’s former spokesman, who is now a CNN political commentator, tweeted out links to the Web site StopKavanaugh.com and to a political commercial that described Kavanaugh as an “extreme nominee” whose confirmation would represent an imminent threat to Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act. Meanwhile, a group of protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court, wielding “Stop Kavanaugh” posters. Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, was there, and warned the crowd, “President Trump has told us what he wants to do. He wants to roll back individual rights, he wants to roll back women’s rights, he wants to roll back workers’ rights, he wants to roll back civil rights.” Elsewhere, other senior Democrats also chimed in. “I will oppose Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination with everything I have, and I hope a bipartisan majority will do the same,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, said in a statement.

Schumer must know that there is little prospect of that happening. Even if the ailing John McCain, of Arizona, is unable to vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination, Republicans will still have a two-vote advantage in the Senate, when the tie-breaking vote of Vice-President Mike Pence is taken into account. On Tuesday, Susan Collins, of Maine, one of the few G.O.P. senators whom Democrats had been hopeful of picking off, released a statement that lauded Kavanaugh’s credentials. Another Democratic target, Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, also indicated that she was comfortable with Trump’s choice.

If all forty-nine Democrats and independents in the Senate vote against Kavanaugh as a bloc, he could still be confirmed. But even if it’s a hopeless gesture, it is vitally important that Democrats, their supporters, and anybody else who harbors a sense of fairness and history register a strong protest in the coming weeks and months.

This battle isn’t merely about Kavanaugh’s judicial record, although, as Schumer and others pointed out, that contains plenty to protest. (My colleague Jeffrey Toobin has written more on this.) According to one academic analysis, Kavanaugh would be the second most conservative Justice on the Court—to the right even of Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s previous appointee, and pretty close to Clarence Thomas.

But there is even more at stake than preventing another rightward lurch on the high court. As Kavanaugh prepares to make his way to the Capitol, and, most probably, to a lifetime appointment in the old courthouse behind it, we are witnessing the dénouement of an outrageous power grab by a radicalized political party, its wealthy backers, and a rogue President. It is essential to remember this wider context.

By now, the broad outlines of how the John M. Olin Foundation and other right-wing groups spent decades nurturing a conservative legal movement to wrest control of the nation’s courts is well known, or should be. (In his Times column on Tuesday, David Brooks provided a brief guide for the uninitiated.) Ultimately, however, the conservative takeover hinged on ruthless power politics: the G.O.P. exploiting its unearned advantage in the Electoral College, the U.S. Senate, and the Supreme Court itself.

At the risk of giving yourself a headache, consider some counterfactuals. Absent the Supreme Court’s 5–4 ruling, in 2000, under Chief Justice William Rehnquist, to halt the Florida recount and allow the election of a Republican President who lost the popular vote, John Roberts and Samuel Alito might not be sitting on the Court today. If, in 2016, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, had adhered to precedent and allowed filibusters on the nomination of Merrick Garland, Gorsuch might well not be a Justice, either. And but for the quirks of the Electoral College nullifying Hillary Clinton’s almost three-million-ballot margin of victory in the popular vote, Kavanaugh would still be a relative unknown.

If these points sound like the complaints of sore losers, they are. But Democrats, Independents, and anybody else who cares about the functioning of American democracy have good reason to be sore. There is no majority of voters out there clamoring for a ban on abortion, restrictions on collective bargaining, roadblocks to legal claims against big companies, or the purging from the electoral rolls of voters who skip a couple of elections. These are the concerns of smaller groups, with strong ties to the Republican Party, whose interests will be disproportionately represented.

To effect this transformation, the Republican Party has relied not just on the quirks of the Electoral College but also on another electoral body that was designed to limit majority rule: the U.S. Senate, where the 1.7 million residents of Idaho receive the same number of representatives as the 39.5 million residents of California. According to the Federal Election Commission, between 2012 and 2016, Democratic candidates for the Senate received some hundred and twenty-two million votes; Republican candidates received about a hundred and five million. Despite being trounced in the popular vote in 2016, the G.O.P. has controlled the upper chamber since 2014—which enabled McConnell to block Garland, Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee; get Gorsuch confirmed; and look forward confidently to the confirmation of Kavanaugh.

This isn’t how democracies are supposed to work. But as Vox’s Ezra Klein pointed out a couple of days ago, the United States is “not-quite-a-democracy.” Rather than adhering to the commitment to equality contained in the Declaration of Independence, it relies on an antiquated electoral system that weighs votes in a manner that, in the modern era, has put Democrats at a structural disadvantage. (To be sure, Republicans in places like New York and California have seen their votes undervalued, too. But since they are fewer in number than Democrats, the over-all direction of the partisan bias is clear.)

By slowly fashioning a ruling conservative bloc on the Supreme Court, the Republican Party has carefully exploited the biases and shortcomings of the political system. Ultimately, that is what makes the prospect of Kavanaugh’s ascension so objectionable. It wouldn’t just cement in place a reactionary and unrepresentative majority. It would be the latest act in an anti-democratic (small “d”) heist.