Imma up this from a comment:
And if it [the death of the Republic] doesn’t happen as a discrete event, it’ll happen through death by a thousand cuts — Trump’s judicial appointees. Or, more likely, it already died and now the mob is just kicking the corpse around. But however that may be, I think the deeper story is how case law has been (as the youngs say these days) ‘weaponized.’ There was a slightly mythical time when the body of rulings were served as a kind of paedia, examples of general wisdom applied to specific instances. That gave way to a more scientistic approach in which the aim was to create a more systematic approach amenable to bureaucratic society. And that, in turn gave way to the progressive-era model, which was amenable to a more administrative, technological society (hence the emphasis on meritocracy) — what we think of the ‘ACLU’ style of identifying cases that could be used to use the court system to advance framings and implement national strategies. What liberals and the left haven’t really internalized, but the right surely has, is the two-pronged approach being pursued by the Kochs OT1H and the Thiel-bots OT0H. The Koch approach has been a many-decades-long strategy of seizing and reshaping the professional machinery the judiciary depends on. (If you haven’t read Nancy MacLean’s book Democracy in Chains, run don’t walk — it’s essential for understanding how we arrived at this point.) But the Thiel approach brought the weaponization to full fruition: applying quant methods to brute-forcing legal strategies (think Gawker or patent trolls love for East Texas). The left/lib reliance on the courts to save us from executive overreach and legislative abuse broke years ago. Those sages and many more deserve real respect, but in the context of case law, celebrity cult dynamics are mostly nostalgia.
(Politico)