Like the effort to impeach Donald Trump, which was underway before he even was sworn into office, the effort to block Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was in full swing before Ronald Reagan even had settled on a nominee, with Democrats promising a “solid phalanx” of opposition to any judge who could not satisfy their various ideological litmus tests.

The breathtakingly dishonest and shockingly vicious campaign against Bork — led in no small part by that third-rate ward heeler Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware — announced a fundamental change in the character of Supreme Court nomination hearings.

And that may have been inevitable: Precisely because the Supreme Court has not been staffed with men such as Bork, who understood the proper role of the judiciary in our constitutional system, the court over the years has become a kind of national super-legislature, one that Democrats frequently turned to for fortification when they failed to achieve their aims through ordinary democratic processes. That intensified the political character of the court and hence the political character of the nomination process.

The campaign against Bork was unusual at the time. It is not unusual now. The standard operating procedure today is modeled on the Democrats’ campaign against Brett Kavanaugh, a Kafkaesque episode during which the nominee’s willingness to defend himself from slander was taken as evidence of his unfitness for the Supreme Court.

Republicans have got in on that action, too, of course, with Sen. Mitch McConnell sitting on Merrick Garland’s nomination until the clock ran out on the Obama administration. It was bare-knuckled and petty but procedurally within the rights of the Senate majority to do so.

That follows a pattern in our politics: Democrats resort to some extraordinary measure without stopping to consider the precedent they are setting and how it might empower future Republican leaders to deploy the same tactics. The Democrats invent Borking, and the Republicans one-up them by suffocating the Garland nomination. The Democrats spend generations gerrymandering congressional districts within an inch of their lives and then have the audacity to complain about it when Republicans, uncharacteristically for that largely feckless party, get too good at playing the same game, in this case by relying on sophisticated computer modeling to perfect the art of the gerrymander.

It is not as though Republicans are entirely blameless in this. Bill Clinton’s misdeeds were genuine — perjury is a serious matter when it comes to the nation’s chief magistrate, and he lost his law license for good reason — but the impeachment effort against him was in no small part cynical and self-serving and it lowered the bar for future efforts, contributing to the situation we see today.

Even so, Democrats should be thinking long and hard about the precedent they are establishing right now. Trump almost certainly will survive this effort, and the next Democratic president to face a Republican House will be much more likely to be impeached. Like “borking,” impeachment will by this example be made an ordinary part of our political process — leaving the nation much worse off and achieving nothing of lasting value.

Procedural maximalism — pushing every petty procedural advantage to the ultimate — is perfectly legal. But democratic republics rely on more than the narrowly construed letter of the law. Prudence, patriotism and public-spiritedness matter, too. In the end, they are what matter most.

The next Democratic president should not be surprised if he gets impeached on some shoddy pretext. He won’t be able to say he didn’t see it coming.

Kevin D. Williamson is the author of “The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics,” out now.