Never Take Power You Wouldn't Want Your Opponents To Have

It's excellent advice, although it's probably never followed:

Having escalated the judicial confirmation wars at virtually every turn since the 1980's, Senate Democrats in the early 2000's pioneered a new form of self-interested obstruction to block a number of President Bush's nominees to the federal bench. When Republicans retaliated in kind during the Obama era, many of those same Senate Democrats -- led by Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer -- voted to eliminate the filibuster rule they'd exploited to thwart Bush. Detonating the 'nuclear option' was the latest ends-justify-the-means maneuver by upper chamber liberals, to whom then-minority leader Mitch McConnell made this final plea prior to the fateful vote:

The American people decided not to give Democrats the House or to restore the filibuster-proof majority they had in the Senate back in 2009, and our Democrat colleagues don’t like that one bit. So they’re trying to change the rules of the game to get their way...In short, unlike the first two years of the Obama Administration, there’s now a legislative check on the President. And the Administration doesn’t much like checks and balances...And get this: [Democrats] think they can change the rules of the Senate in a way that benefits only them. They want to do it in such a way that President Obama’s agenda gets enacted, but that a future Republican president couldn’t get his or her picks for the Supreme Court confirmed by a Republican Senate using the same precedent our Democrat friends want to set. So they want to have it both ways. But this sort of gerrymandered vision of the nuclear option is really just wishful thinking.

As the Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee put it yesterday: ‘If [the Majority Leader] changes the rules for some judicial nominees, he is effectively changing them for all judicial nominees, including the Supreme Court.’ Look: I realize this sort of wishful thinking might appeal to the uninitiated newcomers in the Democratic Conference who’ve served exactly zero days in the minority. But others in their conference should know better...if they want to play games and set yet another precedent that they will no doubt come to regret, well, that’s a choice only they can make.

He added, "you’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.” That warning fell on deaf ears, and Democrats marched forward with their power grab. President Obama, who'd enjoyed a 99 percent confirmation rate on his judicial picks prior to a partisan fight breaking out over his designs to pack the DC Circuit Court, prevailed. A flurry of post-nuclear confirmations allowed Obama to dramatically tilt the federal judiciary to the left, a development that was enthusiastically welcomed by liberals. But as McConnell presciently foresaw, the proverbial shoe is now on the other foot, and the American Left is looking on in horror as President Trump and Mitch McConnell use the Democrat-implemented new rules to confirm an avalanche of young conservative jurists...

It's almost as if McConnell was exactly right in 2013. Pardon me for being unmoved by Democrats' crocodile tears. Given their no-holds-barred partisanship over recent decades on this front, those tears actually taste delicious.