Even in a year when the bizarre is becoming routine in politics, the fight over the Supreme Court vacancy stands out. All signs suggest the Senate’s Republican leadership wants to stick to its threat to refuse any confirmation hearings on President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, until after the November elections. Despite the defections of a few Republican senators who say the Senate should hold hearings, the stalemate over whether to replace Antonin Scalia, who died in February, looks like it could last into 2017.

No Supreme Court nominee in history has waited that long for the Senate to take action. If the court vacancy lasts a year or more, there will be some real costs to leaving the court shorthanded. A court with eight justices will often deadlock in contested cases, and therefore fail to execute the court’s major function: providing resolution on constitutional issues where the lower courts disagree.

But that problem is tiny compared to the real threat that the current situation poses—one we’ve barely begun to consider. That bigger threat is this: The stalemate isn’t time-limited and it isn’t stable. It could last a lot longer than the present election cycle, and if it does, the conflict over Justice Scalia’s successor could escalate far beyond its current dimensions. This is because the Supreme Court’s role in American government rests on a set of conventions for avoiding all-out political conflict—and once those conventions start to crumble, there’s no way to tell how it will end.