EDITORIAL: When the party’s over

OPINION:

The radical left, which now, alas, includes the Democratic Party, has gone off the rails. Worker bees at the Environmental Protection Agency and certain other federal agencies, encouraged by their superiors, are now using encrypted messages to coordinate undermining the policies of the new Trump administration. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, the party’s recent vice presidential nominee, seems to endorse “fighting” the new president “in the streets.” The country has never seen such subversion by a major political party.

Mr. Kaine, like many others in his party, is in a lather because the Republicans might adopt the tactics of Harry Reid, the former Democratic majority leader in the U.S. Senate, to win confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, the new president’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. This is the same Tim Kaine who, in the campaign last year, warned Republicans that if he and Hillary Clinton won, and Republicans tried to block their appointments to courts and the Cabinet, the Democrats would change the rules.

Mr. Reid called this “the nuclear option,” and he invoked it for all but the Supreme Court choices, which would still require 60 votes for confirmation by the Senate. All others could be confirmed by a simple majority, or 51 votes. Mr. Reid and his Democrats, having been fed fake news by the legacy media, thought the election would produce a larger Democratic majority. The champagne would flow like cheap wine for years and maybe decades to come.

It didn’t quite turn out that way. Now the Democrats are paying the consequences for having lowered the bar. They’re powerless, without help from Republicans on the scout for love in the wrong places, to prevent President Trump from assembling the Cabinet he wants.

But if parliamentary routes and good order are closed to the Democrats, maybe disorder is not. Mr. Kaine, in an interview with Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, seemed to endorse violent “demonstrations” as a way to persuade the majority to accede to minority rule. There’s little appetite for moderation in the ranks of Senate Democrats. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, like Mr. Kaine, had been considered more modulated — “nuance” is the fashionable word this season — than the likes of Charles Schumer or Bernie Sanders, but the prospect of the Supreme Court with a conservative majority has dispatched Mr. Wyden to that scary place “around the bend.”

Neil Gorsuch, the president’s choice for the Supreme Court, was once regarded by Mr. Wyden as a lawyer of sterling reputation. He, like all the Democrats in the Senate at that time, voted to confirm Mr. Gorsuch for a seat on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But he now tweets that the judge “represents a breathtaking retreat from the notion that Americans have fundamental constitutional rights.” There’s something about a Twitter account that can fry a politician’s brain.

Some of the Democrats who refuse to accept the results of the election seem eager to move now to sabotage and mayhem in the streets. They liken the president to Hitler (whatever happened to Genghis Khan as the standard by which the opposition could be judged?) and have concluded that the Donald and the fuehrer are so evil that using whatever tactics that work is not only justified, but the moral thing to do.

This is not likely to end well for either the party or the country they say they love. The absurdity of the madness was illustrated this week when the inmates at the Delaware state prison at Smyrna took four guards, killed one, wrecked the prison, and announced that Donald Trump made them do it. Well, why not? The Democrats are blaming him for everything short of the seven-year itch, and there’s no cure in sight.