While most partisan Democrats applauded Harry Reid’s power grab in the Senate yesterday, there were conspicuous exceptions in the media.

Dana Milbank, the snarky Washington Post columnist who loves to lampoon Republicans, concluded that “if Congress wasn’t broken before, it certainly is now. What Reid and his fellow Democrats effectively did was take the chamber of Congress that still functioned at a modest level and turn it into a clone of the other chamber, which functions not at all. They turned the Senate into the House. . . . If it was possible to make things worse in Washington, Reid just did it. ”

Ruth Marcus, Milbank’s fellow Washington Post columnist, had similar reservations. “The rules change also marks a fundamental and unappreciated shift of power from the Senate to the executive branch,” she wrote. “The filibuster should be a break-in-case of-emergency tool for judicial nominees. Democrats liked having it on tap when George W. Bush was president. They may well miss it down the road.”