The Kavanaugh saga has tainted all three branches of government with Trumpist corruption: a Senate majority that will turn a blind eye to the most serious of allegations, a Justice Department that will acquiesce to sham investigations designed to exonerate political allies, and a Supreme Court tainted by the presence of a partisan hatchet man, before whom no left-leaning person or organization could possibly obtain a fair hearing. Sometimes, when democracies die, they do so in grand gestures. But often there is no single event that heralds the end of the rule of law, but a slow, imperceptible erosion of the safeguards against political abuse of state power.

Any sense of civic obligation among Republicans is quickly fading: the idea that the opposition has rights, that judges and elected officials serve all of the American people and not simply their own party’s base, that the judiciary does not exist as a partisan fiefdom to further one side’s ideological agenda. In its place is a growing adherence to reflexive Trumpism. No objection the opposition could have is legitimate, because no opposition is legitimate. Those who support Trump are good, and those who oppose him are bad.

Read Megan Garber on the most striking thing about Trump’s mockery of Christine Blasey Ford.

Republicans responded to Ford’s charges, and those from Deborah Ramirez, by accusing Democrats of waging a smear campaign and of dispensing with the principle that the accused are innocent until proven guilty. But Kavanaugh was up for a lifetime appointment to the high court, not facing criminal charges. The proper frame to evaluate the charges against him is to gauge the cost to the American people of having someone credibly accused of sexual assault on the Court. Instead, Republicans focused on the potential cost to Kavanaugh’s career and reputation. And even as evidence mounted that Kavanaugh had misled the Senate about his high-school behavior, his drinking habits, and references in his yearbook, conservatives insisted Democrats were raising irrelevant matters related to trivial adolescent misbehavior.

But the questions about Kavanaugh’s drinking in high school only became relevant after Ford’s allegation and Kavanaugh’s blanket insistence that he had never drunk to the point of blacking out. One after another, former classmates attested to Kavanaugh’s habit of drinking to excess, raising doubts about the credibility of that blanket denial. They understood, as Kavanaugh did, that acknowledging that he may have blacked out would lend credence to Ford’s allegation. More and more evidence emerged that Kavanaugh misled the Senate about childish references to sex and booze in his yearbook, suggesting that, if necessary, Kavanaugh would lie under oath in order to take his place as a justice.

But even if one believed that Ford and Ramirez were lying, that Kavanaugh’s youthful drinking was irrelevant, and that he had not misled the Senate deliberately or otherwise, Kavanaugh showed himself unfit for the federal bench when he declared, “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit” by “left wing groups” in an act of “revenge on behalf of the Clintons,” and warned that “what goes around comes around.” Kavanaugh himself said in 2015 that a judge must not be a “political partisan” and that judges must make decisions “impartially and dispassionately based on the law and not based on your emotions.” By the most generous of standards, Kavanaugh has disqualified himself on both counts.