Order maybe; Law, not so much.
Too many in the punditry are talking about conservative Republicans as if they're hypocrites because they endorse the lawlessness of J6 or because they're now calling to defund the FBI. The GOP has not been a party that respects the rule of law for a long, long time--at least since the Republican Party became southernized after Nixon. The Republican Party has inherited the autocratic ethos of the Southern Democrats who have always felt that they are justified to break laws without compunction that they believe are based on liberal principles. There is nothing more liberal than the enlightenment concept "rule of law", if by it we mean that whatever legislatures produce through the democratic process. That's not the 'southern' idea about what law is about.
I wrote Rule of Law vs. Law and Order in February 2020. Here's a relevant excerpt:
I wrote a long piece in October entitled Law and Order and the Jacksonian Right in which I argued something that I don't think most Liberals understand, which is that for Law and Order Conservatives, the emphasis is on Order, not on Law.
...Republicans see themselves as the party of law and order. I think this only makes sense if you understand that the more important word in that pairing is "order", in the sense of social order, not the political or legal one. Or to put it another way, the political and legal order has legitimacy only insofar as it is a reflection of the social order. The social order that shapes the politics of [American] social conservatives traces its roots back at least as far as the 1820s when the party of Jefferson became the party of Jackson. Then a rather primitive, premodern customary sense of American identity came to dominate in the political sphere, and in doing so replaced the modern, enlightenment imagination embraced by most of the founders. It was a collective return of the repressed.
We were taught in school that the Jacksonian democracy was a good thing, that it made America more representative of the will of the people. We tend, however to romanticize the "people" because we were not taught that the "people" who saw Jackson as their hero couldn't have cared less about the rule of law and the kind of virtue that is necessary for a true republic to thrive. With the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the older republican imagination of America infused with Enlightenment ideals was displaced by an imaginary that legitimated the lawless, loutish, violent impulses exemplified by Andrew Jackson himself. These Jacksonian Democrats never really cared about good government; they just wanted to be left alone to do their lawless, loutish, violent thing, especially regarding their slaves, the Indians, and the Mexicans. Trump, despite his un-Jacksonian bone spurs, is Jackson redivivus.
Law and Order is not the same as the Rule of Law. Laws are only legitimate for law-and-order Conservatives if they align with and support their traditionalist social order. Any laws that undermine that order or are out of alignment with it have for them no real legitimacy. Law-and-Order conservatives in the past have often approved lynchings, or the kind of thievery and dirty tricks that led to Watergate, or the defiance of the Bolland Amendment that led to Iran Contra, or the contravention of international law that led to the invasion of Iraq, or now the egregious, flagrant, out-in-the-open lawlessness of Donald Trump.
Conservatives feel not need to take the law seriously except when they get to use it as a club to punish their enemies. What matters is the conservative sense of order, and any illegal actions Conservatives commit need not be punished so long as they either promote the traditionalist social order or transgress it in minor ways that don't destabilize it. Shoplifting is a far more serious crime than tax fraud.
Russia used to be an enemy of these law-and-order conservatives when it was ruled by the godless communists, but now that it is a nominally Christian, traditional-order autocracy, they see it as an ally. They are very happy to accept its help in keeping Trump in power. They are gleeful that Brennan, Comey, Yates, and all the national security types who appear on CNN and MSNBC are in such a snit about Trump's dismantling of the government and institutions they have devoted their careers to defend.
And so this explains why Evangelical Christians support Trump. They see him as someone who is restoring the old social order. His personal behavior and lawlessness are irrelevant because they see hm as sent by God to destroy the godless secular Liberal Order. If that means destroying American democracy, so be it. Better a kingdom or autocracy where civil laws align with divine law (in the primitive lex talionis sense) than a democracy that is out of alignment with it. The authoritarian thugs, of course, don't care about the divine order; they just care about maintaining power. But they understand that they need to be seen as champions of the divine order if they are to maintain their base of support.
Liberals need to understand what they're up against with Republicans. The law is no constraint for them because they don't think it's legitimate. We're currently in a cold civil war that is likely to get very hot in the next decade. On the one side Independents and Democrats believe in the rule of law; on the other side, the southernized Republicans who don't. The latter group only believes in using power--violent power if necessary--to impose their idea of social order on everyone else. The law has legitimacy only insofar as it aligns with their idea of underlying social order, which is for them best articulated in Christian Nationalism.
So nothing is more important than Independents and Democrats keeping Republicans out of power, and to do that they must not vote for them, and when in power they must use the full extent and power of the law to keep their lawlessness in check.