Brett Kavanaugh will likely be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice this weekend, which is dismaying on roughly a million different levels. There is the fact that Kavanaugh remains credibly accused of sexual assault. There is the fact that he has proven, under oath, to be a small, dishonest, unremarkable man. There is the fact that his confirmation process was a sick joke and an insult to anyone with a brain. There is the fact that he will provide conservatives with a ruling majority on the court for a generation, and will almost certainly codify laws that will exempt corrupt presidents from wrongdoing, cement oligarchic rule over America, and ensure economic and social inequality for as long as America exists. You and I both know that the damage Kavanaugh has done pales in comparison to the damage he will do to people, and that will make this a very dark weekend in what has been a seemingly endless run of them.

But what really kills me is knowing, deep down, that even if Kavanaugh had somehow been 86ed during this process, conservatives probably would have ended up winning anyway. They would have found some other squeaky clean, Federalist Society pud to nominate, and that pud would sail through confirmation for the simple dint of not being Brett Kavanaugh. Knocking him off would have been a satisfying but short-lived victory, because the current political system is designed so that liberals have to exert the maximum possible effort to achieve the smallest possible victory, if they gain such victories at all.

The fact that liberals had to rely on Jeff Flake—who will leave the Senate soon to take a private sector job where you will need a special security pass if you want to accost him outside an elevator—to make ANY headway against Kavanaugh tells you everything you need to know about how our current system is set up. You do not live in a two-party system. You live in a one-party system, and that’s true whether or not the Democrats happen to eke out a future Presidential win or score a temporary majority of the House next month. Thanks to gerrymandering, voter suppression, conservative Supreme Court rulings, the electoral college, and a bicameral legislature that gives California the exact same number of Senators as fucking WYOMING, Republicans get to play with loaded dice every time they go against Democrats.

I know it’s comforting to think we can vote our way out of this. I’m voting in November and I hope you do as well. But even if that mythical Blue Wave washes ashore, it’s clear now that voting isn’t enough. If voting had been enough, Donald Trump wouldn’t be president right now. As it stands, some American voters are more equal than others, and those voters are white, rural, and conservative. As a result, we have a political system where, in order to win, Democrats must please EVERYONE, while Republicans do not. It’s also why Democratic leaders can’t cast out absolute garbage senators like Joe Manchin, who votes with Trump so often they may as well go in on a land deal together.

And what makes it worse is that politicos and horse race watchers happily accept these terms of engagement, presenting our current political model as a fair fight. Look at fucking Chuck Todd here:

We just experienced a week in America where the president laughed at a potential sexual assault victim, accused two others of being crisis actors, and oversaw a sham FBI investigation into a Supreme Court nominee at the behest of a Republican Congress that demanded the Bureau not find anything unpleasant. Oh, and he committed tax frauds for decades. And yet here’s Chuck Todd, NBC’s lead political analyst, boiling it down to a “rhetorical war.” And that's before we get to Nebraska infant Ben Sasse, who is following the standard playbook of whitewashing conservative sins via airless complaints about partisanship and Washington being a mean and naughty place.