On the morning of January 21st, Democrats all over the country are going to wake up and suddenly realize they care about civil rights.

We've handed Don't Trump the most terrifying, Orwellian surveillance state in history.

According to Michael Hayden, who was NSA Director from 1999 to 2005, Obama placed the program under more congressional oversight than Bush, but “in terms of what NSA is doing, there is incredible continuity between the two presidents.” In fact, the surveillance programs have expanded under Obama, Hayden says, and the spy agency now has more powers now than when he was in command.

Liberals were perfectly fine with the existing Orwellian surveillance state, as long as a Democrat was in the White House. In fact, anyone who blew the whistle of Obama's abuse of powers was demonized.

Although the Snowden revelations led to the appointment by President Obama of a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which later issued a 300-page report with 46 recommendations to dramatically curtail the NSA’s surveillance powers, Snowden himself was vilified as a traitor by prominent Democrats such as Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Bill Nelson, and several congressional leaders called for his arrest and prosecution.
On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton flatly stated that “he broke the laws of the United States” and “stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands.” Asked whether Snowden should be allowed to return to the United States, she said, “I don’t think he should be brought home without facing the music.”

It wasn't just politicians.

When the New York Times revealed Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, 60 percent of registered Democrats thought the program was “unacceptable.” But after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a dramatically larger surveillance apparatus in 2013, a 61 percent of Democrats said the opposite — presumably because they trusted the man in charge.

The fact that a U.S. Court of Appeals found the NSA's domestic spying program to be violating existing laws, wasn't enough to change the minds of Democrats, but having a vindictive man who makes enemies lists in the White House will surely give Democrats a "come to Jesus" moment.

“it’s so great our enemies are making themselves clear so that when we get in to the White House, we know where we stand...Let me just tell you, Mr. Trump has a long memory and we’re keeping a list.”
- Trump surrogate Omarosa Manigault

Democrats can be forgiven for not seeing this one coming. After all, who could have predicted that a non-Democrat would have ever won the presidency, amirite?

Civil liberties advocates have been warning of a scenario like this for more than six years. The extraordinary national security powers George W Bush pioneered and Obama shamefully entrenched could now fall into the hands of someone many people consider a madman.

Even at this late date, Democrats are still not clamoring to push Obama to do some reforms to protect civil rights before he leaves office. Maybe they've forgotten how.

Unlike when Obama was president, Democrats will suddenly remember that they care about torture and war crimes.

Trump’s abhorrent daily pronouncements about what he would do as president come at such a rate that we have become numb to them. We’ve lost count of the amount of times he’s claimed he’ll bring back waterboarding, or some forms of torture that are “so much worse” (something that would constitute a war crime). Or that he’ll not only kill terrorists, but members of their families as well – another war crime.

It's understandable why Obama swept those war crimes under the rug.

In short, when it comes to torture, Obama’s hands aren’t entirely clean either.
Some go further. “His record on torture has been abysmal, to the point of obstruction, concealment, and ultimate complicity,” said Wells Dixon, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has defended detainees who have been victims of torture.

The question is, how will Democrats rationalize the eight year-long coma on these issues?

When the drone program is handed over to the Trump administration, will Obama supporters still think it’s a good thing that the executive branch has the authority to kill US citizens in complete secrecy?

A very good question. My guess would be "no".
The Democratic Party abandoned its opposition to civil rights violations once Obama took the oath of office in 2009.

And then there is the issue of war.

the Obama administration has done more damage than Bush did to the constitutional principle that Congress should be the only governmental body that can declare it. The US is currently waging war in multiple countries – Syria, Iraq and Libya – using a law written 15 years ago meant for Afghanistan, to go after a terrorist organization that did not exist at the time. When President Trump decides to invade the first Middle Eastern country that looks at him the wrong way, to “take their oil”, it will be that much harder to stop him because of the precedent the current administration has set.

Remember way, way back when Democrats were against pointless wars? You almost have to be Gen X or older for that.
My opinion is that it's far too late to remember how to oppose useless wars. Democrats should continue to "embrace the suck", because there is nothing to stop the Imperial Presidency now. The opportunity for that has already passed.

In the twenty-first century, the Special Operations Command, which oversees those elite forces cocooned within the regular military, has gained ever more power to act in ever more independent and secretive ways. In those same years, the country’s elite troops, including those Green Berets, the Navy SEALs, and the Army’s Delta Force, have grown to staggering proportions, while ever more money has poured into their coffers. There are now an estimated 70,000 of them – a crew larger than the actual armies of some reasonably sizeable countries – and from trainers to raiders, advisers to hunter-killers, they now operate yearly in an overwhelming majority of the nations on this planet. Moreover, they generally do so in remarkable secrecy and (as once might have been said of the CIA) their most secretive part, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), responsible for the killing of Osama bin Laden, is in essence the president’s private army.
In these last years, President Obama, who gained a reputation for being chary of war, has nonetheless taken on with evident relish both those special ops forces and the drone assassins, while embracing what Washington Post columnist David Ignatius recently termed the role of "covert commander in chief." Now, in these last weeks of his presidency, his administration has given JSOC new powers to "track, plan, and potentially launch attacks on terrorist cells around the globe" and to do so "outside conventional conflict zones" and via "a new multiagency intelligence and action force." As a result, whatever this new task force may do, it won’t, as in the past, have to deal with regional military commands and their commanders at all. Its only responsibility will be to the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and assumedly the White House; even within the military, that is, it will gain a new patina of secrecy and power (while evidently poaching on territory that once was considered the CIA’s alone, no small thing at a moment when President-elect Trump is not exactly enamored with that agency).

The good news is that liberals will now have a brand new issue for meaningless virtue signalling that can be tossed aside again once a Democrat wins.