Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)
It's been two decades since the Senate
confirmed as many judges as it is currently on track to do in 2014. If Democrats succeed at confirming the 12 judges Majority Leader Harry Reid is trying to get votes on before the Senate goes home for Christmas, the year's total will be 88, the highest since 1994. That's in large part because by the time Democrats changed filibuster rules to break through Republican obstruction of President Obama's nominees, there was a major backlog. If the Senate gets to 88 for this year:
That would leave just 50 federal appeals and district court vacancies out of 856 judgeships, according to data from the U.S. court system. That's the lowest number of vacancies since December 2008, the month before Obama took office. Vacancies during his presidency peaked at 108 in December 2010.
When they're fighting judicial nominations, Republicans like to try to portray it as somehow unprecedented that this president has gotten to appoint judges, and have even gone so far as to suggest
removing seats from the nation's second-most-powerful court in order to block Obama from influencing its makeup. But the fact that now, six years into Obama's presidency, we are just getting back to the vacancy level that existed under George W. Bush right before Obama took office should show how ridiculous those Republican arguments are. And Bush was able to confirm judges for his last two years in office despite Democrats controlling the Senate, another reminder of how differently Democrats approach judicial nominees from a Republican president than Republicans approach nominees from Democratic president.
So as Senate Republicans whine about Harry Reid making sure these nominees get a vote, remember the real history here.