The Senate likely has just one full week of work left before November's election—this week. The Senate also has
153 pending nominations to executive and judicial positions which have cleared committee and are waiting for floor votes. Most of these appointees are subjected to the eight-hours of debate rule, all eight of which could be yielded back but since Republicans don't do that, assume the Democrats do and there's four hours of debate for each.
It doesn't take a math major to calculate that there's no way in hell even a tenth of these nominations will be voted on. The majority of them couldn't even be acted up on if the Senate stayed in session every working day between now and Christmas. With the need to keep government running and the other legislative priorities, nominations probably won't be at the top of the agenda in the post-election weeks before the next Congress begins.
Supposing Republicans take the Senate this fall, it's entirely possible that all those pending nominees never get a vote.
"My guess is they put a stop to a host of nominations and try to use that process for hostage taking and leverage," said Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Certainly it means the ability of Obama to get any judicial nominations through becomes about zero." […]
"Confirmation rates will certainly drop (perhaps plummet from their near 100% level of late), but Republicans will have some incentive to negotiate with the White House over acceptable nominees (particularly for judgeships in states with two GOP senators)," said Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University, in an email.
And if there happens to be another Supreme Court vacancy? A Mitch McConnell-led Senate would have every reason to wait it out until 2017 and a possible new Republican president.
Senate reform on the filibuster for nominees has helped correct a long-standing Republican imbalance on appellate courts, so there's that and it is significant. But there's still 50 district judgeships, and seven more appellate positions vacant. Apart from the courts, there's 46 would-be ambassadors waiting for votes right now, including in Turkey (kind of important at the moment) in eastern Europe, and in Africa.
If Republicans take the Senate back, getting these seats filled is going to take some administrative horse trading that will make the Michael Boggs nomination fiasco the norm rather than an aberration. If Democrats retain the Senate, Reid is going to have look hard at further filibuster reform to get these nominations finally confirmed.