The Left actually wanted to pack the Supreme Court! The very notion is destructive of an essential institution. It was historically condemned. Yet Democrats, from standard-bearer Joe Biden on down, lacked the fortitude to condemn the iconoclasts in their midst. Suddenly, the shambling Trump campaign saw a path to victory: branding their opposition as heedless radicals.

It nearly worked.

When President Trump named Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the high court just weeks before the November 3 election, Democrats were irate — and in 2020 “irate” means poised for the next quantum leap toward the abyss. Counting on winning the presidency and the Senate, they resolved to kill two birds with one recklessly hurled stone: They would end the filibuster, thereby vitiating the Senate as the republic’s bulwark against mob rule, and then install progressive radicals in an expanded Court, thereby eradicating the tribunal as a judicial institution that resolves cases by law rather than political preference. It was a ruinous idea. Ruin, however, is an aspiration of the furies that drive what passes for American culture today. Biden is well past a prime during which he was, even then, too shallow to resist.

I said it nearly worked. There are several reasons why Donald Trump came up short, but the chief one is that a president should be a staunch guardian of our norms. Despite considerable policy successes, he would never be mistaken for that. Indeed, the coarseness of his attacks on foes, the way he reveled in his shock-jock persona at rallies that were more like rock concerts, the way he, as no less than the nation’s chief executive, personalized policy disputes — all these shortcomings explain why he lost a close race, and particularly why he ran behind down-ticket Republicans in the suburbs.

So, what happened next? Turning on a dime, the same Trump devotees who had just been apoplectic about Court-packing rejected the American norms of grace in defeat, of elevating preservation of the system’s legitimacy over personal grievance. Even as court challenges fizzled for lack of hard proof of alleged election “rigging,” the rhetoric sizzled: an election “stolen” by systematic cyber-fraud and deep-state dirty tricks. The point of the heated narrative? To stoke Trump’s loyal base into pressuring legislatures — controlled by GOP majorities in such contested states as Pennsyl­vania, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona — to refuse to appoint Biden slates of electors. That is, even though Biden won the popular vote in those states, Trump electors would cast the states’ votes, giving an Electoral College victory to the incumbent.

Needless to say, this gambit would make Court-packing seem positively tame.

For our purposes, the salient thing about such seemingly beyond-the-pale strategies as packing the Supreme Court and upending a national election by way of state legislatures is that they are perfectly legal.

Article III of the Constitution establishes the Supreme Court but not its size. That is left to Congress’s discretion. During the first 80 years of constitutional governance, the number of justices on the high court ranged from six to ten. Since 1869, there have been nine. The ensuing 151 years have cemented the Court’s vital role as our system’s apolitical, rule-of-law check on the political branches and the state governments. That is why, in 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Court-packing threat was deemed so extreme he could not get it adopted at the height of his power and with Democrats firmly in control of both congressional chambers. But extreme is not the same as illegal.

The Constitution, moreover, makes the state legislatures supreme on the matter of appointing electors to choose the president. It is a common misimpression that We the People have a “right” to vote. There is no such right in our founding law. But state legislatures long ago delegated their power to the public, and popular presidential elections have thus been held for the better part of two centuries. There is no legal requirement, though, that popular elections be conducted or that they be dispositive. Theoretically, state legislatures could claw the power back.

The case could certainly be made that the composition of the Supreme Court and an individual right of citizens to vote should be codified. Nevertheless, these are just two of many instances in which, for all of our rule-of-law rhetoric, we rely on norms and politics to maintain domestic tranquility. Indeed, as we’ve witnessed over these past months of rioting and unrest, when order is lost, the law on its own is impotent to restore it.

Our Constitution enables extreme curative measures, though it does not encourage them, because a constitution is adopt­ed to ensure survival against threats that may be unforeseeable but could be existential. “The circumstances that en­danger the safety of nations are infinite,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 23, and therefore “no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed.”

Hamilton was specifically referring to executive power, but the same holds true for all power in our constitutional republic. A free society vests power in public officials precisely to deal with perils we hope will never come to pass. It is highly unlikely but not inconceivable that partisan state judges and bureaucrats could conspire to steal an election; were that to happen, the state legislatures would be duty-bound to act as a check. It is similarly possible, though not probable, that the Supreme Court could become so pervasively political that Con­gress might need to explore adjustments in its composition in order to restore its critical function.

These would be desperate measures, suitable only to truly dire circumstances. Our law allocates authority to meet such challenges, whose uncertain nature re­quires that the officials have broad discretion. The unavoidable result is that power can be abused. The criminal law is not suitable for disciplining government officials, because the exercise of discretion is in the gray area of judgment. To misjudge the nature of a threat, to overreact, may demonstrate unfitness to wield power. It does not prove a crime, and if the deterrent against decisive action to quell a threat were prosecution, officials would be discouraged from acting when action is needed most.

It is norms, not laws, that prevent the abuse of power. If they are eviscerated, a cycle of ruin is inevitable.

In 2016 the Obama administration leveraged the intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus of the government against its Republican political opposition on the pretext of Trump’s “collusion with Russia.” Plainly, if a presidential candidate ever actually did appear to be conspiring with a hostile foreign power — a possibility that was of no small concern to the Framers — the incumbent administration would be obliged to investigate. But the law cannot prevent investigative powers from being abused on a pretext. What prevents such abuse is the norm against the exploitation of counterintelligence and prosecutorial powers for political advantage; that norm is shored up by knowledge that if it is eroded, today’s abuser will be tomorrow’s victim.

Democrats ran roughshod over that norm, limning Trump as illegitimate and never accepting his election. Along the way, they undermined the norm that reserves Congress’s extraordinary impeach­­ment power for egregious wrongs that generate bipartisan consensus for the president’s removal. Furthermore, Democrats have fought every attempt to bolster the integrity of elections, demagoguing such precautions as Republican schemes to disenfranchise marginalized communities.

And now they reap the whirlwind: a president who attempts to delegitimize an election he lost by peddling claims of a massive fraud scheme — on the scale of the Democrats’ farcical “collusion with Russia” — bolstered by the rational inference that Democrats’ mulish opposition to all commonsense election-protection measures evinces an intent to cheat. Meantime, Trump partisans demand the investigation and prosecution of Demo­cratic partisans who investigated and prosecuted Trump campaign surrogates . . . while Democrats make plans to investigate and prosecute Trump once he leaves office.

In the spirit of the times, Donald Trump was elected to be the disrupter of a Wash­ington that has grown into an arrogant, self-dealing administrative behemoth, unresponsive to the anxieties and dismissive of the liberties of the people it purports to serve even as it rules. There is indeed much that needs disrupting. But not everything does. In the main, norms are not the wiles of the deep state. They are the foundation on which a free society sustains cohesion and self-governance. We’ll reverse the erosion of norms or live to dread it.