The Democrats fortify against Gorsuch

There was a disturbing New York Times editorial by David Leonhardt titled, "Why Democrats Should Oppose Neil Gorsuch". One would hope such an editorial would be about problems with President Trump's Supreme Court nominee. One would be wrong:

It’s important to remember just how radical — and, yes, unprecedented — the Senate’s approach to the previous Supreme Court nominee was.

Republican leaders announced last March that they would not consider any nominee. They did so even though Barack Obama still had 10 months left in his term and even though other justices (including Anthony Kennedy) had been confirmed in a president’s final year.

The refusal was a raw power grab. Coupled with Republican hints that no Hillary Clinton nominee would be confirmed either, it was a fundamental changing of the rules: Only a party that controlled both the White House and the Senate would now be able to assume it could fill a Supreme Court vacancy.

...So what can Democrats do?

First, they need to make sure that the stolen Supreme Court seat remains at the top of the public’s consciousness. When people hear the name “Neil Gorsuch,” as qualified as he may be, they should associate him with a constitutionally damaging power grab.

Second, Democrats should not weigh this nomination the same way that they’ve weighed previous ones. This one is different. The presumption should be that Gorsuch does not deserve confirmation, because the process that led to his nomination was illegitimate.

Arguments of right or wrong, good or bad, have all left the building. This is all about political strategy now. Here is Leonhardt's moral justification for this:

But Democrats simply cannot play by the old set of rules now that the Republicans are playing by a new one. The only thing worse than the system that the Republicans have created is a system in which one political party volunteers to be bullied.

All of this completely ignores the fact that Obama's SCOTUS nominee, Merrick Garland, could have tilted the Supreme Court in favor of the progressive socialists. The GOP didn't get control of the Congress by agreeing to be accommodating to President Obama. They were elected to be obstructionist, and that is what they did.

This also ignores the fact that Trump had nothing to do with Republican obstructionism. Even if he supported it, it wasn't him. Blaming Trump is like blaming Andrew Johnson for Lincoln's assassination: Johnson wasn't even in the room at the time, just as Trump wasn't in power at the time.

Now the Democrats, ignoring the American people's general dislike of Obama (he only got elected twice because the GOP ran even worse candidates), see themselves as justified in throwing a temper tantrum, using the childish lament, "But they started it!"

Meanwhile, Trump keeps picking up in the polls, as Democrats make him look sympathetic.

Go ahead Democrats, and look like the spoiled brats you are. Dig in tight, hold your collective breaths, and force the Republicans to remove your filibuster (you can thank Harry Reid for giving them the means to do so), thereby making the Republicans look like the adults in the room, regardless of whether they deserve to look that mature.