It seems to really be happening: Senate Democrats reportedly have the votes to filibuster Judge Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, prompting a near-certain invocation of the nuclear option by the Senate GOP. This extraordinary step represents the final culmination of a series of partisan procedural escalations over control of the judiciary, beginning (depending on who you ask) with Harry Reid’s elimination of the filibuster for lower court nominees in 2013, or with Mitch McConnell’s Merrick Garland stonewall—or even with Ted Kennedy’s infamous political assassination of Robert Bork in 1987.

Even in this unprecedented time, however, the Gorsuch filibuster feels like a particularly ominous development for America’s embattled political institutions—one that takes us right up to the edge of an abyss we really don’t want to fall into. It will deal a death blow to the notion of the Senate as an oasis of bipartisan comity. And it will set the precedent for an even more nihilistic style of political warfare than has been the norm—one where all bets are off and political factions are restrained only by what they can get away with.

So the events that are about to transpire will inflict real damage on the Senate as an institution and on the political process in general (or, if you like, ratify damage that has already been inflicted). But perhaps even more worrisome, and less appreciated, is the damage it stands to inflict on the Supreme Court and the rule of law itself.

The source and nature of the Supreme Court’s sweeping authority (one with few parallels among judiciaries in other developed democracies) has been debated since the dawn of the Republic. How is the ideal of a self-governing democratic society reconciled with the surrender of so much fundamentally political power to nine unelected lawyers? As Alexander Hamilton famously pointed out, the judiciary, unlike the executive, has no mechanism for enforcing its rulings; its power depends entirely on deference from the elected branches and the states. There is nothing concrete preventing this deference from being withdrawn in an era of collapsing norms and exploding distrust.

But for most of the nation’s history—and certainly in the second half of the twentieth century—the Supreme Court has wielded a kind of regal legitimacy that has forced the political branches of government to accede to its rulings. No one believes that the Court is infallible, but the justices have traditionally been regarded as worthy of more deference than ordinary political appointees, and the their edicts as more significant than those of administrative agencies. The idea of the High Court as the embodiment of a super-democratic consensus is a crucial element of the American civic religion; there are doubters, but the basic theology has been broadly accepted enough for the delicate system to stay in place.

The escalating partisanship of the Supreme Court confirmation process over the last generation has already done a lot to undermine the idea of the Court as an especially dignified, impartial body, but the coming Gorsuch showdown seems poised to damage it in a particularly lasting way. The 60-vote threshold for Senate confirmation used to give each justice a level of cross-partisan legitimacy. It also gave presidents an incentive to find justices who would be acceptable to at least the moderate wing of the opposing party.

Under the post-Gorsuch precedent (assuming the Democrats don’t back down from their maximalist position) the last vestiges of this legitimacy-reinforcing system will be thrown out of the window. No justices will get through when the Presidency and the Senate are controlled by opposing parties. When the President does have the Senate, he will simply pick the youngest potential justice who is politically satisfactory to partisans on his side. The spectacle of High Court judges shoved through on narrow partisan lines for lifetime terms will corrode the fiction of the apolitical judge that the Supreme Court, and indeed the entire third branch, depends on to win deference from elected officials and the public at large.

Americans still have confidence in their courts and will not tolerate open defiance of them. For all his protestations, Donald Trump suspended enforcement of his travel ban in accordance with a court order. The Democratic-controlled City of Chicago struck its onerous gun laws from the books when the Supreme Court proclaimed them unconstitutional in 2010. The Republican government of Texas honored a 2016 Appeals Court ruling against its abortion restrictions.

But a Court populated by judges transparently pushed through by one political faction or the other would be easier for a pugnacious president, or an ideological state or local official, to defy. As Angelo P. Codevilla has pointed out, the success of President Eisenhower’s at-the-barrel-of-a-gun enforcement of Brown vs. Board in Little Rock in the 1950s was dependent on a federal government, including a Supreme Court, with a much greater level of “moral authority” than ours has today. Will there be the political will to enforce the rule of law on such momentous matters when the Supreme Court resembles a permanent panel of bureaucratic political appointees like any other?

All this is to say that the fallout from a Gorsuch brinksmanship goes far beyond the deterioration of Senate norms and the ability to pass legislation. It threatens to profoundly change the public perception of the judiciary in a way that triggers a full-blown crisis of the rule of law in the United States. This crisis may have been a long time coming, but the Democrats’ present Supreme Court ultra-partisanship brings it ominously closer.