“Certainly it would have been easier to defeat them had the rules not changed,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer acknowledged on Thursday. The New York Democrat has mocked Trump’s nominees as the “Swamp Cabinet” and has spent the last few weeks denouncing the incoming president’s picks for their conflicts of interest, unpaid taxes, and their adherence to rigid conservatism. He’s accused Senate Republicans of trying to jam through the nominees with quick hearings and minimal vetting. “From top to bottom, it’s clear that Republicans were attempting to orchestrate a cover up of the president-elect’s swamp cabinet,” Schumer said. “Senate Democrats and the American people won’t stand for it.”

But can they stop it?

While Democrats plan to allow at least two of Trump’s nominees to be confirmed Friday after his inauguration, they have identified eight of his picks as “controversial” and are demanding either more information or a lengthy floor debate before a vote. Those include Rex Tillerson for secretary of state, Steve Mnuchin for treasury secretary, Senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general, Representative Tom Price for health and human services secretary, and Betsy DeVos for education secretary. Yet because of the rules change, Democrats can only stall for so long—probably a few weeks in total. They need at least three Republican defections to defeat any nominee, and so far not a single GOP senator has said they would vote against a Trump choice.

Schumer has voiced regret about the nuclear option since Trump’s election, telling CNN earlier this month that he had argued internally for keeping the 60-vote threshold not only for Supreme Court nominees but for the Cabinet as well.

Reid, who retired earlier this month, has no such regret. “I doubt any of us envisioned Donald J. Trump’s becoming the first president to take office under the new rules,” he wrote in The New York Times in December. “But what was fair for President Obama is fair for President Trump.”

Democrats had grown frustrated over the GOP’s frequent use of the filibuster, either to block nominees from receiving an up-or-down vote or simply to gum up the works in the Senate and limit how many people the Democrats could confirm. Reid and his allies have said winning confirmation of three judges to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals—widely considered the nation’s second most powerful court—alone justified the move.

It was obvious Democrats would have less power to block Trump nominees immediately after the election. But the impact of the 2013 rules change is becoming even more apparent as Trump’s nominees face the kind of problems that have forced potential appointees to withdraw in the past. Democrats have, for example, assailed Price for buying stock in a medical-device company just a week before introducing legislation that would have benefitted the firm. Representative Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s pick for budget director, disclosed that he had failed to pay more than $15,000 in federal taxes on a household employee. A similar issue forced Tom Daschle to abandon his nomination for health and human services secretary eight years ago. DeVos has yet to detail how she will comply with conflict-of-interest laws as education secretary.