EUGENE ROBINSON: Democrats Should Filibuster Gorsuch with 2018 in Mind.

I’m not counseling eye-for-an-eye revenge. I’m advising Democrats to consider what course of action is most likely to improve their chances of making gains in 2018, at both the state and national levels.

The party’s progressive base is angry and mobilized. Many Democrats are convinced that FBI Director James Comey and Russian President Vladimir Putin decided the election. The very idea of a Trump presidency sparked vast, unprecedented demonstrations in Washington and other cities the day after the inauguration.

In the two weeks since, Trump has only piled outrage upon outrage, as far as progressives are concerned. He took the first steps toward building his ridiculous wall along the southern border, but with U.S. taxpayers’ dollars, not Mexico’s. He squelched government experts who work on climate change. He weakened the Affordable Care Act in the hope that it would begin to collapse, which would make it easier for Congress to kill it. He displayed comic ignorance of our history (somebody please tell him that Frederick Douglass has been dead since 1895). He signed executive orders banning entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries and refugees from around the world, an action so appalling that huge crowds gathered at major airports in protest.

And Trump is just getting started. Democrats cannot even limit the damage, let alone reverse it, without more power than they have now.

When the Democratic base is setting fire to Berkeley, leading chants of “Genocide, racial hate, America was never great” at NYU, and practically begging Republicans to blow up what’s left of Senate congeniality, I’m not quite certain the American electorate is willing to trust them with more power than they have now. Certainly that’s been the message of almost every election since 2009.