This isn’t just empty rhetoric, they mean it. And packing the court with at least two additional seats—one for Ginsburg and one for Merrick Garland, whom Democrats feel is entitled to a seat simply because President Obama nominated him—is just the beginning of what Democrats will try to do if Biden wins the election. Schemes are now afoot to pack the court, abolish the Senate filibuster, and grant statehood to Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.

What all these moves have in common is that they would erode the constitutional mechanisms in place that Democrats see as impediments to their complete control over the levers of government power.

Expanding the number of states, for example, is a work-around for what they would like to do but can’t quite bring themselves to say outright: abolish states’ equal representation in the Senate. Why, they ask, should sparsely populated conservative states like South Dakota get as many votes in the Senate as California and New York? By adding what Democrats believe would be permanently blue states, they could cement their control over the Senate and stop worrying about what Americans in South Dakota or Wyoming think.

The same logic applies to getting rid of the Senate filibuster. Once Democrats are in control of the Senate, why should a minority of GOP senators be allowed to stop them from carrying out their designs? The common thread here, from court-packing to new states to ending the filibuster, is that Democrats believe they have an obligation, once they gain power, to ensure they never lose it again. If that means shredding the parts of the Constitution that have held them back in the past, then so be it.

That, in turn, means there’s more at stake in November than the electoral fortunes of one Donald J. Trump. The Constitution itself is on the ballot.