An effort to impeach Kavanaugh would be so fraught that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor have very professionally professed their liking of him, in an effort to preserve the integrity of the institution. Democratic candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Julián Castro have called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment, but Democratic Whip Dick Durbin said, “Get real.” An illegitimate confirmation backed by a sham investigation must be treated as if it were legitimate. If all that matters is partisan scorekeeping, then the so-called victors will look at this and think this somehow burnishes the victory.

But this will not pass. This is only the first of many anniversaries when Americans will revisit this awful episode, and every time we will be struck anew by the modern GOP’s turpitude, the hearing’s brevity, the abridged investigation, and the corrosive permanence of the effects. A party hell-bent on winning triumphed this round, but it has no idea what’s coming if an institution that most Americans no longer respect tries to move the law in an unpopular direction—like banning abortion. Despite this country’s revolutionary past, Americans have temperamentally been law-abiding institutionalists. That can change. Granted, it would take an enormous amount of bad faith to construct a government so unrepresentative and unworthy of trust that working around a Supreme Court decision with civil disobedience would come to seem not just thinkable but necessary.

Republicans made a certain calculus when they confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court: victory at any price. The GOP has celebrated the victory. It has not yet understood the price.