Leave it to The New York Times. Having watched Senate Democrats miss the opportunity to damage Alito in the hearings and fail miserably in mobilizing public opinion against him, Gail Collins & Co. play what looks to be one final card in the SCOTUS game today by trying to browbeat Senators into supporting a filibuster:

The real risk for senators lies not in opposing Judge Alito, but in voting for him. If the far right takes over the Supreme Court, American law and life could change dramatically. If that happens, many senators who voted for Judge Alito will no doubt come to regret that they did not insist that Justice O'Connor's seat be filled with someone who shared her cautious, centrist approach to the law.

Take a step back and think about the irony here.  Last March The New York Times editorialized (Times Select) in support of the Democrats' unprecedented filibustering of 10 of Bush's federal appellate nominees  - a move, by the way, which required the paper to repudiate its decade-earlier call to abolish the filibuster altogether when Republicans were in the minority under Bill Clinton. 

Support for those filibusters led to a crisis that eventually resulted in The Gang of 14, a compromise that by almost all accounts is seen to have worked out poorly for the Democrats. In addition to letting through some of the nominees most objectionable to the left like Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown, The Gang of 14 agreement obliterated the standard of "extraordinary circumstances" and left Democrats even more hamstrung to deal with SCOTUS nominees of the caliber and quality of Roberts and Alito.

In other words, Democrats are finally paying the price for having used the filibuster so excessively and injudiciously during the Bush administration. A former Judiciary Committee counsel for the Democrats put it bluntly: 

"We shot our wad. We filibustered 10 guys, and at the end of the day the worst got on anyway. If we had not used the filibuster and pissed off the Republicans over the past four years, if it was seriously being entertained for the first time [against Alito], we might have succeeded."