When people like me look ahead to next year’s midterm elections, we tend to contemplate subversion, and how to pre-empt or defeat it.

We play contingencies out as war games in our minds:

What will we do when Republicans try to make it harder to vote? To gum up mail voting? To disqualify ballots? To intimidate voters at polling places? What happens after elections if and when Republican election officials in red or purple states refuse to certify Democratic winners?

All of this is as it should be, and, with some exceptions, I think Democrats in the Trump era have amassed a good track record of fighting on this turf. The party has a ways to go on so many fronts—it’s just not the Bush v. Gore party anymore.

But there’s another subversion scenario—an admittedly unlikely one—that I don’t think anyone’s gamed out, because it doesn’t have anything to do with ballots. It’s one where, seeing the writing on the wall, Republicans take proactive steps to disempower the executive branch—not so much to brush back Donald Trump, but to hobble his successor.

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Not long ago, before the Republican Party entered its insurrectionary phase, this would have been a higher-tier concern.

Gerrymandering states and delegating power to Republican executives—only to rescind executive authority when those officials became lame ducks—was the GOP’s principal antidemocratic method until they embraced outright theft in 2020. ...