The most critical government document released on Wednesday—the one that’ll have the most wide-ranging impact in the future—was not James Comey’s prepared testimony for the Senate Intelligence Committee about his interactions with Donald Trump. It was a simple press release, issued by the White House, announcing a “fourth wave” of judicial nominations since the Trump inauguration. The eleven nominations included four district court judgeships, three for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, three for the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, and one for the Court of Federal Claims. Conservatives were uniformly delighted.

All told, Trump has nominated 22 judges to fill vacancies across the federal bench. Thus far, only two—Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Sixth Circuit Court Judge Amul Thapar—have been confirmed. But the prospect of filling vacancies over time explains a lot about why congressional Republicans have stood by Trump, despite the erratic and stormy start to his presidency. As long as Trump keeps funneling a steady supply of conservative jurists to the Senate, in a bid to dramatically reshape the federal courts, Republicans can go to bed happy that they’re fulfilling at least one major element of their political project.

Judicial nominations are the one area where the Trump administration is “running like a fine-tuned machine,” as the president boasted in February. In fact, Trump’s team has far outstripped the efforts of his predecessor. By this date eight years ago, President Obama had made just four judicial nominations: Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and three nominations for the Court of Appeals.

What accounts for this rare outburst of competency from the Trump White House?

It is true that Trump was blessed—thanks mostly to a virtual freeze on judicial confirmations in the last two years of the Obama presidency—with more opportunities than Obama. According to the American Bar Association, at the beginning of June 2009 there were 72 judicial vacancies; today there are 132. But even given that, if you want to do this by percentages, President Trump, at this point in his presidency, has nominated replacements for 16.7 percent of all judicial vacancies; President Obama by this time had nominated replacements for just 5.6 percent.

What accounts for this rare outburst of competency from the Trump White House? Certainly, judicial nominations are a lighter lift than legislation; thanks to changes to the Senate filibuster made by both parties, judges at all levels now need only 50 votes for passage, meaning Republicans can confirm them without Democratic support. Those rules were still in place in 2009, and throughout Obama’s first term. He did have a filibuster-proof majority for brief periods, from July–August 2009 and September 2009–February 2010. But the former president certainly had less margin for error.