Doesn't anybody know how to play this game?

"Dare I suggest," writes the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen, "that the quality of governance in this country has taken a downward turn of late?" Or as Casey Stengel, while managing the New York Mets on their way to a 40-120 season in 1962, reportedly asked, "Can't anybody here play this game?"

In successive weeks both Democrats and Republicans have shown a downward trend in the quality of governance and raised questions about whether anybody in Washington can play this game.

Start with the Democrats, and their strikeout last week in the hearings on Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Their attacks on Gorsuch as a scourge of "the little guy " were, as liberal Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman wrote, "a terrible idea." Judges are supposed to decide cases on the law, not the net worth of litigants.

Democrats are now lining up to filibuster the nomination, on the spurious grounds that confirmation has always required 60 votes. Actually, Justices Thomas and Alito were confirmed in 1991 and 2006 with 52 and 58 votes.

Democrats are still steamed that Senate Republicans blocked Obama nominee Merrick Garland last year. But the Constitution doesn't require the Senate to hold hearings or a vote on nominees.