ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Republicans simply cannot cede this Supreme Court battleground over Judge Brett Kavanaugh to Democrats.

If they do, it’s not just President Donald Trump who will be affected — who will see his rightful White House authority to select judicial picks erode in the face of angry politicking.

It’s the country’s constitutional system that will ultimately suffer.

It’s the fact that the Constitution provides a means of choosing who will serve on the country’s highest court, one that begins with voters, moves to the executive and wraps in the legislative.

The people, by their ballots, have already weighed in and decided that it was to be Trump, not Hillary Clinton, who has the power this time around to select Supreme Court justices. The people, also by their ballots, decided that it was to be Republican senators, not Democrats, who do their constitutional duty and advise and give consent to the president’s picks.

The people have already spoken and decided Democrats should have a very minor role in this process.

If Republicans don’t seize the day on this, reel in the Kavanaugh chaos and stand firm to do what the citizens elected them to do — the midterms will see Democrat wins. The midterms will usher in a Democrat-controlled Senate. And the midterms will prove to be the final stroke to Trump’s “Make America First Again” agenda — unless, of course, he goes the anti-constitutional Barack Obama route, bypass Congress and executive order the heck out of all his policy wishes.

But the real travesty will linger past this administration.

The real travesty will be that America’s judicial nomination system, regarded by most tempered minds as a fair and somber process, will have caved to the shrill shrieks of political activists.

Any Supreme Court nomination in the future will follow the same path.

Democrats won’t just have won on Kavanaugh. They would have won on their overall goals for America — they’ll have achieved a great success in stripping the country of its limited government, law and order democratic-republican system.

And that’s a debasement from which it will be tough, very tough to recover.

The gate guards at this circus show called the “Kavanaugh’s Nomination Hearings” are Republicans. Republicans must stop the Democrats from wresting control of what rightly belongs to the GOP.

Republicans must stand strong in the face of this craziness — if not for Kavanaugh, then for the fate of the entire republic, the constitutional future of the entire country.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @ckchumley.

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