The past few nights I’ve been binge-watching “Billions”, the Showtime series starring Paul Giamatti as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York obsessed with taking down a hedge fund billionaire, played by Damian Lewis. There’s a lot to like about the show, (and it gets much better in the second season), but close to the heart of the drama is Giamatti’s character struggling to stay within the lines of propriety in pursuit of a criminal who is every bit his tactical equal and far, far better financed.

Some times, if there’s only person playing the game “the right way”, the rules are a serious impediment to winning. And not winning means truly nefarious activity prospers even more than it already is, exerting an even deeper and more insidious effect on hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocent people.

You can see where this is going.

With Donald Trump being handed the opportunity to appoint a second Supreme Court justice in only 17 months, liberals/progressives/Democrats, whatever you want to call anyone who isn’t an evangelical Trumpist, are staring at a moment of moral reckoning attached to a seismic event.

One more Trump justice, very likely someone relatively young with a good chance at a 20-30 year run on the top bench, means the Court’s balance will shift well out of balance for the foreseeable future. That kind of keel-turning puts not just Roe v. Wade, but any control of dark money in politics, environmental protection, gun control, gay rights … and on and on … in serious, stark jeopardy.

So yeah, elections matter. (And with that thought in mind, let’s pause here and revisit the fact that the 78,000 votes in three states that handed the election to Trump were dwarfed by the numbers of the high-minded and naive who voted for Jill Stein having bought and sold the argument that Hillary Clinton was the second coming of the Gambino crime family.)

As most of us know, a variation of that Purity Of Essence mentality afflicts the entire Democratic establishment. Certainly to the extent of a willingness to resort to the kind of utterly shameless but effective tactics Mitch McConnell used in denying a vote on Merrick Garland in 2016.

That sort of thing is, you know, “low”. And “we” always “go high.”

But this heart attack serious. Particularly vulnerable are protections for all sorts of chronically at-risk constituents liberals/progressives/Democrats claim — claim — to be so concerned for and devoted to. Failing to stick a knife, even a nakedly low-minded knife, into this Court choice means, quite literally, capitulating (again) to powerful regressive forces ideologically opposed to the interests in those particular citizens.

By last night the usual Democrats were making the usual noises about “holding” McConnell to the same standard he applied to Garland, and denying him a vote until after the next Senate is seated in January. The usual verbiage of “appealing” to Republican colleagues, “reaching across the aisle”, “hoping” that Republican senators “will do the right thing” was making the rounds of cable chat shows and churning up a sickening knot in my stomach.

“Reaching across” and “hoping” is the same as accepting defeat.

Yes, a firestorm of public protest — from the usual cultural liberals — will crank up a lot of emotion over this. But I have no confidence that anyone in the current Democratic establishment has either the reptilian guile or the raw Darwinian instinct to stick one of their manicured hands deep into the septic system of politics and stop this next deployment of a weapon of bona fide mass destruction.

I’d use the example of Lyndon Johnson, a classic ratf**ker. Johnson would resort to anything. But Johnson usually had the benefit of a majority somewhere.

Which means your Chuck Schumers and Chris Murphys and Diane Feinsteins are going to have to reach down even deeper for a game-changer, for something ordinarily so obnoxious few parents would be proud to tell their children it is the “fair” and “honest” thing to do. (As though real-world everyday politics always are.)

In “Billions” Giamatti’s US Attorney believes in the law, despises the parasitic power elite kiting money back and forth for their own fabulous gain and to the detriment of all the common chumps too honest/lazy to get in the game of stone cold killers. (Giamatti’s guy also has some basic male issues with his wife and her affiliations, but I’ll let that go for the moment.)

The point is: from time to time Giamatti wrestles with the entirely rational logic that you don’t stop a mob boss and his lethal capos with a noble assertion of the Boy Scout Oath.