As nominations for the Supreme Court coming from the Trump administration go, Judge Amy Coney Barrett is pretty darn good. Her ruling in the Purdue Title IX case was exemplary. Her position on civil rights is strong. How she might rule on the ACA or abortion remains something of a mystery, but the assertion that she is a guaranteed vote to end them is wildly speculative, as she has made clear that she strongly believes in the legal doctrine of stare decisis.

Hey, Trump could have nominated Jeanine Pirro. And as much as Merrick Garland has been idealized by the Dems because of the offensive Republican refusal to give him a vote, he was no great hero of liberal jurisprudence. Judge Barrett wouldn’t be Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but then, no one would expect Trump to nominate a Justice Ginsburg, and it’s hardly clear that if the next Supreme Court justice were nominated by Joe Biden, the person would be any more Notorious than Barrett.

But the fact that the judge nominated is both a sound and decent choice without regard to the president nominating her, the question remains whether there is anything the Democrat Senators can or should do to try to prevent confirmation. Whether it’s a good idea or bad, there is one indisputable fact: Garland didn’t get a vote because the Senate Republicans had the raw clout to prevent it from happening. Barrett may be confirmed for the exact same reason. All the rationalizations aside, the cries of hypocrisy outside the Senate chamber, there is one, and only one, reason for what is happening. Power.

Is that a bad thing? It’s unseemly, for sure. It’s unprinciped. It’s shameless and disgraceful. But it works, and when the benefit is worth the cost, then the Senate Republicans are ready, willing and most importantly, able to pay the price. But what about the Senate Dems?

Faced with a moment with apocalyptic implications, leading Democrats fall somewhere on a spectrum that runs from oblivious to resigned. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) wants to appeal to the GOP’s “sense of decency” and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) is complaining about procedural maneuvers that could delay the confirmation process.

Whether the implications are apocalyptic or banal is more a sales pitch for the tribe. But unless they admit that Judge Barrett is actually a pretty fine choice and, while they will throw hype against her to get whatever political juice they can milk from the situation, lack the interest to fight this time, why are they giving up before the fight even starts?

The person with the power to organize top Democrats to confront this confirmation is Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. He has the opportunity to be the hero who saves all that Democrats hold dear. As he strives to do so he should seek guidance from a counterintuitive source, one frequently standing just a few feet away: He should do whatever Mitch McConnell would do. We all know that if the roles were reversed, McConnell would do all in his power to whip the Republican Conference into line and slow things down.

We know what McConnell would do if it were a Dem president and his team held the majority of the Senate because he did it. What Mitch would do in Schumer’s shoes isn’t as clear, but the point isn’t the nuts and bolts he might employ, but whether he would lie down, play dead, and give up.

One of us was trained as a death penalty lawyer, and learned from the best in the country, heroes who file motion after motion to keep their clients alive. Great death penalty lawyers do not roll over when the odds are high. They don’t rely on in-house counsel; they call people in other states pushing for new and creative ideas to keep their clients alive. Delay can mean life: There are thousands of people alive today because determined death penalty lawyers kept their clients alive until there was a moratorium, or the death penalty was ended in their state.

As criminal defense lawyers, we’re painfully aware that many, perhaps most, of our cases are lost causes. Our clients not only did it, but the prosecution has a confession, video, 27 witnesses and his mother flipped on him. Still we fight, because that’s what we do. And weirdly, we even win a “lost cause” once in a while through grit and tenacity.

You never know when a prosecutor screws up, a cop gets caught in a needless lie or a tape can’t be found. Sure, it doesn’t always happen, but every once in a while it does. And that’s the moment we exploit because that’s what our oath requires us to do. On the other hand, sometimes our client is innocent and they have the same evidence and we fight the lost cause just the same.

Too often, I see young lawyers on social media talk about how it’s too hard, too depressing, too much for them to take. They talk about leaving court and crying in their office. They can’t take it. They want to give up. And in response, they get a thousand tummy rubs about how others feel the same, and how hard it is, and how they cry too.

I often want to jump in and tell them to snap out of it. We fight. We lose. We get up to fight again the next day. This is not a job for quitters and criers. Of course it’s depressing. But if we quit, we never win. This is the life we chose and if we can’t handle the stress, do real estate closings. I don’t do this much these days, as they not only don’t want to hear it, but actively despise being told their self-indulgent misery isn’t good enough.

Schumer probably can’t do a damn thing to stop the confirmation of Judge Barrett, and that probably isn’t the end of the world. It might actually be a good thing. But that’s not the point. If it matters, then fight it, and keep fighting it, and don’t stop fighting it until the battle is over, even though it seems like a lost cause.

A death penalty lawyer doesn’t stop until the switch is thrown because he has no other choice. We need to stop being a nation of whiners, quitters and apologists. If you really believe it matters, then fight the good fight until the battle is lost. Then wake up tomorrow to do it all over again.