Did you notice your anxiety levels spiking this past week? Have you found yourself angrier than normal? Or even if you’ve kept your cool, have you seen others lose theirs?

Where spirited debate survived on social media, the ghouls of angry invective, arguments ad hominem and even ad baculum, and attribution of bad motives, have crept in.

Official Washington and the political media are losing their collective minds because a potentially decisive Supreme Court seat is at play. This may tell us something about cable news, social media, or the U.S. Senate. But it mostly tells us about the Supreme Court.

The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is tearing us apart and driving us mad because the Supreme Court has too much power over the people and institutions of the United States.

Ed Whelan’s tweetstorm Thursday night was one such act of madness. Whalen is a respected conservative activist and scholar. We hold him in high regard, and were startled, to put it mildly, when he posted on Twitter the name and face of a Kavanaugh classmate whom Christine Blasey Ford's accuser may have confused for Kavanaugh.

Whalen in the morning deleted his Twitter thread and apologized thoroughly. While his allies asked how he could make that mistake in the first place, we almost understood. This battle has fried the brains of half the folks involved and at least addled the rest.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who has voted against her party’s leadership on FISA warrants, and who likes to talk about her opposition to Trump nominees in terms of “civil liberties,” went before the cameras to say that Kavanaugh must be guilty because he hasn't invited the FBI to investigate the allegations against him. “Is that the reaction of an innocent person? It is not.”

If you don’t want to be investigated (again) by law enforcement, you’re clearly guilty — this is an insane thing for a supposed liberal to say. But welcome to the Kavanaugh fight.

Sen. Mazie Hirono, the Democratic senator from Hawaii, also let loose this week, and also not in a good way. “I just want to say to the men in this country — just shut up….” She’s also been dropping F-bombs in the halls of the Capitol to reporters.

And the reporters have not been hiding their delight at this. Jonathan Weisman, a New York Times news-page editor, cheered on Hirono’s comments with a tweet consisting only of flames. His colleague, Glenn Thrush, chided the Republicans for wanting to get Ford before the committee soon, writing: “This feels like the moment in the dealership when you waver on buying the car, start reading the finance agreement closely, and the dealer says, ‘Enough! Let’s get u in that car today!’”

It would have been a fine line from a columnist at the Times, but Thrush is supposedly a news reporter. Thrush deleted his tweet, realizing he had let the mask slip. Thrush shouldn’t feel too bad — we’ve all had to delete tweets this week, and plenty of his colleagues also couldn’t keep up the act of neutrality under the stress of the nomination.

Reporter Ken Dilanian gave an editorial on air on MSNBC Friday afternoon, declaring it “a bad idea” to have a hearing without an FBI investigation (so he was literally arguing the Democratic line). This was the same reporter who, in a foreshadowing of Whalen’s tweetstorm, wrote an article Wednesday supposedly corroborating the charges against Kavanaugh, but based entirely on a deleted social media post by a random woman who wasn't friends with Ford and had since declared she had no first-hand knowledge of the story. (Unlike Whalen’s tweetstorm, Dilanian’s farcical article is still on the Internet.)

Republican lawmakers are losing their minds as well. Republican congressman Ralph Norman somehow thought it was funny to joke that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is accusing Abraham Lincoln of groping her.

And then, there are the death threats. The Kavanaughs and the Fords have both received them. It’s a fever of anger and hatred and insanity spreading throughout the country.

A healthy republic wouldn’t have this problem, because a healthy republic wouldn’t have nine judges acting as absolute oligarchs. The courts have become legislators and dictators of social policy. What freedoms you have are determined not by elected officials responsible to voters, but by unelected lawyers serving in lifetime appointments.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out this exact problem. Outrageous rulings like Roe v. Wade that find no grounding in the Constitution but merely in the policy preferences of activist judges have poisoned the well.

Our nine-person ruling oligarchy is being selected right now, and this is why everyone is losing their minds. And the return to sanity begins with a return to a jurisprudence based on the text of the law and of the Constitution.