Senate Freedom-Haters come to regret their circa-2013 tactics

They thought their worldview was, going forward, the default position of the country, and so they didn't give a thought to Republicans prevailing when they nuked the filibuster. And now they're getting their knuckles bent backwards and dropping to their knees:

Senate Democrats are eager to make Donald Trump pay a political price for nominating staunch conservatives to fill out his Cabinet, hoping to exact revenge for the GOP's stubborn opposition to President Barack Obama's nominees.

But there is little they can do about it -- and some top Democrats are now coming to regret it.

That's because Senate Democrats muscled through an unprecedented rules change in 2013 to weaken the power of the minority party to filibuster Cabinet-level appointees and most judicial nominees, now setting the threshold at 51 votes -- rather than 60 -- to overcome tactics aimed at derailing nominations.

With the Senate GOP poised to hold 52 seats next Congress, some Democrats now say they should have thought twice before making the rules change -- known on Capitol Hill as the "nuclear option."

"I do regret that," said Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a Democrat who voted for the rules change three years ago. "I frankly think many of us will regret that in this Congress because it would have been a terrific speed bump, potential emergency break, to have in our system to slow down nominees."

With their power weakened, Democrats are weighing how to make life difficult for the Senate GOP. 

They are planning on making the fight over Rep. Tom Price's nomination to lead the Health and Human Services Department a proxy war over the GOP's plans to to dramatically overhaul Medicare. They want to turn Steven Mnuchin's nomination to lead the Treasury into a battle over regulating Wall Street. And they want to make Sen. Jeff Sessions answer for his hard-line stands on civil rights issues and against comprehensive immigration reform. 

Senate Democrats plan to make speeches and mount objections to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's efforts to quickly schedule votes to confirm much of Trump's Cabinet by the time he is inaugurated in January. Under the rules, they could delay votes from taking place for a few days at a time, temporarily slowing down the Trump agenda.

But they ultimately won't be able to stop those nominees -- unless Republicans defect and join the Democratic opposition. And that fact has begun to grate at Democrats, who have complained bitterly at Republicans' stands against Obama's nominees -- most notably their unprecedented refusal to even give the President's Supreme Court choice, Merrick Garland, a hearing.

Some Democrats realize they've made life harder for themselves.

"In specific circumstances, we may regret that we can't block a nomination," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut. "But I think that the American people want action, and they want the process to work. And they want the folks whom they have elected to actually do the job and get stuff done."

One person who seems to be having buyer's remorse over the change in filibuster rules: Sen. Chuck Schumer, the incoming Democratic leader. Schumer told The Washington Post last month that he privately lobbied Senate Democrats in 2013 to maintain the 60-vote threshold for Cabinet-level nominees, but: "I didn't prevail."

Asked twice at a news conference last week, Schumer declined to say if he thought invoking the nuclear option was a mistake. He instead sharply criticized Price's views on Medicare, and said, "That's all I'm going to say."

Michael Barone notes that the Left's collapse here is in the context of a worldwide shift:

Britain's Conservatives, returned to government in 2010, are in a commanding position over a left-lurching Labour party. France's Socialist president, with single-digit approval, declined to run for a second term. European social democratic parties have been hemorrhaging votes, and got walloped in Sunday's Italian referendum. In Latin America and Asia, the left is declining or on the defensive.

Overall history is not bending toward happy acceptance of ever-larger government at home. Nor toward submersion of national powers and identities into large and inherently undemocratic international organizations. The nation-state remains the focus of most peoples' loyalties, and in a time of economic and cultural diffusion, as Yuval Levin argues in his recent book The Fractured Republic, big government policies designed for an age of centralization have become increasingly dysfunctional.

So the Left retreats into myopia and nostalgia. Since it is an ideology primarily based on feelings anyway, it is the natural recourse to attempt to relive the heady days of the 1965 - 2010 period, when it felt so good to be a part of the "revolution," the "counterculture," the force for "fundamental transformation."

But, while we're talking about feelings, a huge swath of the populace felt differently. They saw their freedom and their prospects for a bright future dwindling markedly.

So to the F-Hers in the Senate, and to the formerly mainstream media, and to the identity-politics jackboots gripping the throats of America's educational system, I say, come on over to our side. Let yourself be mugged by reality! You'll wonder what took you so long.