President Donald Trump’s second term has so far been a constant barrage of unconstitutional actions and illegal orders. So it was thus no surprise when the Senate on Monday confirmed Trump’s former personal lawyer and Justice Department lackey, Emil Bove, to a lifetime appointment on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

That 50 Republican senators would install this fascist bootlicker to one of the most powerful judicial positions in the land for life is, as MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann put it, “a nail in the coffin” for a system of checks and balances on authoritarian presidential overreach.

There’s a risk, however, after a grave blow like this to legal, political, and constitutional norms, that liberal epitaphs to the American constitutional order will mourn the wrong thing.

Bove’s appointment confirms something worse than the Republican embrace of lawlessness. He represents the Republicans’ use and abuse of our fraught constitutional order for the purposes of enacting profound, life-denying, and long-lasting injustices to uphold a white nationalist regime.

Liberal epitaphs to the American constitutional order risk mourning the wrong thing.

Calling on the restoration of preexisting norms of law and constitutionality to reverse course will be, at best, insufficient. After all, liberal reliance on a system of order above justice helped deliver us Trump and his jurist enablers in the first place.

This is not to understate how appalling it is that Bove has been appointed a federal judge.

“It is one thing to put lab-designed Federalist Society members on courts across the country — and, to be clear, several of Trump’s nominees from his first administration went far beyond that,” wrote legal journalist Chris Geidner when Trump nominated Bove, “but it is another thing altogether to name a lawless loyalist to a federal appeals court.”

Geidner called Bove’s confirmation a “line that cannot be crossed.” It has now been crossed.