HOT dog! A both-barrels Michael Anton blast at some unusually fat, juicy targets.

The instant Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing was announced, the battle lines were drawn. Or, more accurately, one side girded for battle, while Republicans clucked with confusion about what to do next.

Which should be no surprise. If Republicans are good at anything, it’s finding “principled” reasons to betray their constituents and contradict their much vaunted philosophy. President Trump, naturally, has sounded strong, as, to his credit, has Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). But the majority leader has to manage a fractious caucus and a thin margin. Many of his members either will be looking for excuses not to vote, or for a reason to vote no, or (worse) will be persuadable by sophistical arguments as to why stabbing their president, their voters, and their country in the back is “the right thing to do.”

The two most recent, and therefore currently binding, expressions of the will of the people were the elections of 2016 and 2018. The former produced a Republican president and reaffirmed Republican control of the Senate, in place since the election of 2010. The latter reaffirmed Republican control of the Senate yet again. The will of the people, therefore, as expressed through elections—the only legitimate basis for the exercise of political power in our constitutional system—is that conservative justices be elevated to the Supreme Court.

It wasn’t Republicans who nuked the filibuster for judicial nominees. Can you recall a single instance of Republicans treating a nominee as disgracefully as the Democrats treated Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, or Brett Kavanaugh? I can’t. Yet they constantly and sanctimoniously insist that the process is sacrosanct while scolding Republicans to obey every past procedural and conventional nicety that the Democrats have already torched.

Republicans mostly go along obediently. The Democrats nearly always vote in lockstep against any Republican judicial nominee; Republicans routinely break ranks and vote for Democratic nominees. A phrase I’ve heard to describe this faux-magnanimity is “beautiful losers,” though there’s nothing beautiful about it.

Does anyone for a second think, were the shoe on the other foot, the Democrats would hesitate to confirm their pick? To ask is to laugh.

The call to respect “norms” rings hollow after four years of the Left, the leftist media, the courts, and the administrative state all breaking norms, to the point of threatening if they don’t get their way on this vacancy, even more systemic change: D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood (four more Democratic senators, forever), abolishing the Electoral College (New York, California, Chicago, and Philadelphia electing the president, forever), and packing the Supreme Court.

The Democrats know what political power is for: to enact your side’s agenda. They and their media allies successfully gaslight Republicans into fearing that exercising political power is “partisan” and therefore illegitimate—but only when Republicans do it. Democrats themselves have no hesitation.

Nor should they. The whole point of our democratic-republican system is for voters to elect people they perceive to be on their side, who favor their own approach to common problems, and who when given the opportunity then enact that agenda. That, in essence, is democracy. That is what Republican senators are there to do. Let them do it.

“Let,” hell. Hold their feet to the fire and MAKE them do it, by God. Vacillating, nervous-Nellie GOPe squishes have just been presented with one final opportunity to make good here, before a veritable horde of people walk away from their party forever in total disgust. Their Job-like patience exhausted by an unending train of slippery-slimery DC dissembling, ducking-and-diving and shucking-and-jiving betrayals, and forked-tongue tough talk, succeeded by absolutely nothing at all, those long-suffering GOPe constituencies have been gradually stripped of all faith that any hope remains for American politics ever being reformed or redeemed.

Lied to, cheated on, courted then spurned by a rogue’s gallery of surpassingly treacherous, untrustworthy swine with less personal integrity than a deer tick, those put-upon and fed-up folks are a powder keg of righteous, boiling anger, one which all ProPols ignore at their great peril. And trust me, the fuse is lit.

So you’d best square them shoulders, stand up on them hind legs like men and not curs, nut on up, and do the right thing here at long last. Because if you don’t turn the right way at this truly critical crossroads, in these truly dangerous times—well, there are other ways to be rid of you than voting. All of them much less pleasant ones. For you.

I don’t even have to say the words at this point, do I?