For all the maddening blizzard of destructive policies they have inflicted upon the state, the North Carolina Republican Legislature consolidated power with a simple two-step plan. First, gerrymander themselves into a voter-proof majority. Second, ensure that that gerrymandered legislature reigns unimpeded by the checks of executive or judicial power. Today, rumors are swirling that House GOP leaders may unite their two undemocratic weapons into a single assault on what’s left of our democracy.

According to speculation in Carolina Journal and NC Policy Watch, Republican leaders are considering the step of impeachment against Democratic state Supreme Court Justices. Specifically, Justices Anita Earls and Sam Ervin IV may find themselves the targets of impeachment drives over a pending case on gerrymandering. Republican justifications for this skulduggery are specious at best, invoking Earls’s pre-governmental career as a civil rights attorney (never mind that every Justice had a career before joining the court), and that Justice Ervin faces the voters this year (in a race in which legislative gerrymanders play absolutely no role whatsoever). In impeaching the Democratic Justices, Republican legislatures would midwife a Republican court just in time to uphold their obscenely gerrymandering political maps.

So, the rumored Republican plan entails attacking a coequal branch of government in order to defend gerrymandering. Rarely do pillars of misrule come together like this. But this synthesis of authoritarian means is appropriate for a state party that has, despite the lack of intellectual curiosity that prevails among rank-and-file members, been quite inventive in its search for ways to re-engineer North Carolina as a gerrymandered one-party autocracy. This union of methods is not just an interesting coincidence; it reflects the GOP’s well honed, if often clumsily implemented, killer instinct in the war on democracy.

If they go through with their impeachment gambit and it somehow succeeds, the GOP will have struck the most appalling blow against democracy seen in any American state since Reconstruction. Strong words, I know. But no state has gone so far as to remove Justices from the bench in order to protect gerrymandered maps that in and of themselves severely limit the exercise of representative government. North Carolina would have a constitutional crisis and P.R. disaster on its hands. Perhaps the only person feeling even a bit of grim vindication would be former UNC political scientist Andy Reynolds, who years ago publicized his finding that North Carolina had degenerated into a government below the standards of a functional democracy.

But then, North Carolina Republicans have a habit of going farther than any other state has gone. As one of the state’s top Republican caudillos, Senator Ralph Hise, proudly observed, the NCGOP has had the most conservative record of any legislature in the country since their seized power in 2010. The Monster Voting Law made other voter-suppression efforts look lukewarm in their potency. The NCGOP’s ag-gag bill was described by the New York Times with the following words: “No state has gone as far as North Carolina.” North Carolina, home of the only successful coup in American history, once again stands athwart the currents of democracy and backlash that have for so long been at loggerheads in America. May liberty get just one more chance.