In a way, I have to give them credit.
A lot of people said it couldn't be done. That you can't pay people $174,000 to be a member of the U.S. Congress and then literally and blatantly have one party absolutely refuse to do your job. To filibuster everything. To vote no on everything.
To hold up Judicial Nominees to the point of ridiculousness.
Ah, there's the rub. The GOP frustrated Senate Democrats to the point that they played the "nuclear option." There's no filibuster option left for Judicial appointments, once they're out of committee.
(Then the GOP just stalled everyone in committee so that they didn't have to worry about a straight up-or-down vote, either.)
And now there are Judicial emergencies across huge numbers of our country's courts. Just in time for the GOP to come into office in control and, unless Senate Democrats embark in the same kind of obstructionist behavior they've spent the past eight years decrying, Federal Courts across the country are going to be filled with the worst kind of right-wing judges.
Sure, they can do a lot of damage to the Supreme Court. But most cases never see the Supreme Court. A vast amount of case law is settled at much lower levels.
The GOP played the long game, you see. They gambled that most voters wouldn't be sophisticated enough to understand more than "the government isn't working." That "Washington is broken." They gambled that most voters wouldn't peer past the headlines and understand that one party was deliberately and systematically breaking it. On purpose.
They gambled that after years of accusing the media of liberal bias, the media would bend over backward to show that both sides were at fault. They gambled that stories of how both sides of the aisle used to work together would start to sound like fairy tales. They gambled that that they could seize on the flimsiest of comparisons to show that sometime in the past, with some other President, the Democrats did it, too.
Most of all, they gambled that people who wouldn't understand why government wasn't working would look to the President, and see him as the leader of the party they considered in power, and then strike out at that party come election time. But maybe that wasn't much of a gamble after years of othering the black man in the White House, was it?
They played the long game, and from here it looks like maybe they've won.
We must figure out how to snatch that victory from them so it is not absolute. We must begin to figure out what OUR long game must be.