Republicans have provoked a Constitutional crisis in America. They’ve now set a precedent that a sitting president will no longer have the authority to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court or other federal courts if the president’s party does not control the Senate. If allowed to stand, Mitch McConnell’s act of political terrorism against the United States so frays the fabric of the Constitution that it will cease to be the controlling document of this nation. If the majority of Republicans continue in lockstep with McConnell, the crack in the constitutional foundation will prove fatal. This short-sighted flirtation has opened a fissure in the bedrock, and future partisans, unable to resist the easy manipulation their majority confers, will be unable to resist gutting the Constitution. This sort of unbridled power always corrupts.

Let’s imagine, for example, that Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, but like Obama, faces a Republican majority in the Senate. Then imagine that Clarence Thomas dies during President H.R. Clinton’s term of office. What do you suppose the Republican Senate will do when Clinton nominates Thomas’ successor? The same thing they’re doing now: Mindlessly block the nominee, regardless of credentials. Do nothing. Steal their paycheck. Speed the nation’s descent into another crisis.

Or imagine Donald Trump wins the presidency, Democrats win back control of the House and Senate, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg decides to retire from the High Court during Trump’s first two years. Do you think Trump will be able to appoint a Justice to fill the vacancy left by Ginsburg? No. The Republicans have started a war that no one wins, in which the nation is burned to the ground. McConnell and his fellow-terrorists shriek that government doesn’t work, while throwing sand in the gears of any and every government program they can, dismantling the political infrastructure that has held this country together for more than 200 years.

The Republican Party would rather destroy the nation than allow a black man to wield the power of the office afforded him by the vote of the American people. It’s no coincidence that this unprecedented dismantling of the Constitution and our political institutions has occurred during the two terms of the nation’s first black president. The seamy underbelly of America has been exposed yet again, more than 100 years after the Civil War.

If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, you can rest assured these terrorist tactics will continue and perhaps grow worse. The Republican Senate has triggered a Constitutional crisis, one of the few since the birth of this nation. In their intellectual torpor, Americans have elected men who believe denying power to a black man is more important than preserving the nation once revered for its experiment in self-governance.

In 2016, that experiment has failed, and history’s judgment will lay that failure at the feet of the Republican Party of the United States of America. The party that nominated Donald J. Trump for president. The party that touched a lit match to U.S. Constitution. If the Senate refuses to vote on the merits of President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, there will be no going back. The Constitution becomes merely an old piece of paper, and the experiment ends with us. It’s quite sad, really.