Relaxing the Senate’s confirmation rules has paid off for Democrats:
Contrary to some predictions, the GOP hasn’t reacted to the rules change by slowing the confirmation process to a crawl. The above chart seems to indicate that fewer nominees have been confirmed overall — but the Senate was in session for fewer days in the latter 6 months. When one accounts for that, the confirmation pace seems unchanged — the Senate has confirmed about 2 nominees for each session day.
The big change, though, is how many of those confirmed nominees are now federal judges with lifetime appointments. Compared to most executive branch nominees, who will serve only two and a half more years, judges seem more consequential to Obama’s legacy. And in a post-nuclear Senate, far more are getting through. Here are the numbers broken down by district courts and appellate courts
David Fontana remarks that more “than 99 percent of federal cases are never decided by the Supreme Court and are resolved at the final stage by these other federal courts”:
Over the course of his entire presidency, Obama has succeeded in having more federal judges confirmed than did President George W. Bush, who put a lot of work into transforming the federal courts. When President Bush left office, ten of the 13 federal appellate courts had a majority of judges nominated by Republican presidents, two had an equal ratio of Republican and Democratic nominees, and one had a majority of judges nominated by Democratic presidents. Now, nine have a majority of judges nominated by Democratic presidents, while four have a majority of judges nominated by Republican presidents.
The Dish 