In the closing days of this election, we’ve seen a consensus building within the Republican Party that, should Hillary Clinton win the presidency but not the Senate, she should be denied Supreme Court appointments—and that perhaps all of her nominations to the federal bench should be rejected.

We’ve seen FBI Director James Comey—seeking perhaps to head off Republican criticism and more-damaging leaks by partisan agents hoping to influence the election—intrude outrageously into the presidential campaign with innuendo about Clinton’s emails that, intentionally or otherwise, created an unwarranted atmosphere of criminality around the Democratic Party’s nominee.

And now, we’re seeing leaks to news outlets from FBI officials that reflect generously on Donald Trump and negatively on Clinton. The New York Times’ FBI sources, for instance, are at pains to insulate Trump from politically damaging evidence that he and Russian intelligence and propaganda outlets are operating symbiotically. And this Wall Street Journal article details an intense appetite, in FBI field offices across the country, for pursuing every possible investigative avenue related to Clinton, no matter how attenuated.

Republicans are citing this laughably tendentious outpouring of FBI leaks and disclosures as pretext for years of investigations of Clinton’s as-yet unsecured and unconstituted administration; and even letting slip that they might move to impeach her for imagined crimes.

Suspected criminal wrongdoing on Clinton’s part has been the one constant, dependable aspect of GOP behavior. It started with the terrorist attack on our diplomatic outpost in Libya four years ago, the subsequent discovery of her non–State Department email address, the further revelation that she ran all non-classified professional email communication across an unsecured, personal email server, and continued with Comey’s Friday comments that the FBI was looking into newly discovered Clinton emails but that the bureau “cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant.”