Up until three weeks ago, Senate Republicans had gone out of their way to block Obama’s highest-profile executive-branch nominees, typically for no other reason than that the president had selected them. The GOP finally backed down after Majority Leader Harry Reid threatened to do away with the filibuster for such appointments, and seven nominees promptly sailed through the Senate. But the victory was fleeting. Last week, Republicans simply shifted their fight from the executive to the judicial branch, vowing to deny an up-or-down vote on all three of Obama’s picks for the critical DC court of appeals.

As before, Republican senators insisted that Democrats would be crazy to junk the filibuster in response to such obstruction, arguing that Democrats would regret the move once they were reacquainted with life in the minority. But this time Republicans were even more emboldened, dismissing any hint of Democratic hardball as a bluff. “Unless Democrats are prepared to say they’ll never filibuster a federal judge or never filibuster a cabinet person,” Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions told Talking Points Memo, “I don’t think that their threat should be given much weight.”

Sadly, Sessions may be right. Last month’s deal over Obama’s nominees came after a meeting among 98 senators in which, according to The New York Times, Democrats conceded “that their headlong drive to alter the rules may have been overly aggressive.” Many Senate Democrats seem genuinely alarmed by the idea of a filibuster-less existence should they lose their fragile majority.

But these fears are way overblown. Democrats would be in a stronger position if they went ahead and abolished the filibuster—not just for cabinet appointees and judges, but for legislation, too. That should strike fear in the hearts of Republicans and, at the very least, ensure that Democrats get their way when the GOP obstructs their nominees.

The basic reason for the Democratic advantage is that they’re likely to win the presidency a lot more often than Republicans over the next 20 to 30 years. The demographics are just relentlessly skewed against the GOP. As my colleague Nate Cohn has documented exhaustively, the growth of minority groups—especially Hispanics—means that the 2016 electorate will be as diverse as the 2012 electorate even if turnout among these groups drops back to its 2004 levels (that is, before the nation’s first black major-party nominee). And the trend lines only get worse for the GOP after 2016.