That effort has been undertaken, however, against constant and unflinching opposition from Democrats in the Senate. In every way conceivable, they have made the work of confirming judges more difficult. As everyone recognizes, the Constitution gives the power to nominate and appoint judges to the President, and it gives the power to confirm to the Senate. Rather than working with us, the Democrats in the Senate have proven consistent obstructionists.

First, obstruction has been offered in the form of what’s called the blue slip. Traditionally, the blue slip process has been used to assure consultation between the White House and home state senators of judicial nominees. Democrats and their grass-roots and media allies, however, are demanding that the blue slip process be used as a single-senator veto. They insist that a single home-state senator be able, at any time and for any reason, to stop a nomination dead in its tracks without any Judiciary Committee consideration at all.

I can understand why they want to weaponize the blue slip like this. After all, they once used the filibuster to prevent confirmation of Republican judges, but then abolished nomination filibusters so that no one else could use it. Democrats are today trying to turn the blue slip into a de facto filibuster. They want a single senator to be able to do in the Judiciary Committee what it once took 41 senators to do on the Senate floor.

The next obstruction weapon of choice has been completely unnecessary delays on the floor of the Senate. Democrats have done everything they can to slow the procedures necessary to get to a roll call vote. For context, before 2001, only 1 percent of judicial nominees with no opposition were confirmed by a time-consuming roll call vote. Under President George W. Bush, that figure jumped to 56 percent. Before 2001, there had been four filibusters of judicial nominees, and no majority-supported judicial nominee had ever been defeated by a filibuster. Under President George W. Bush, Democrats conducted 20 filibusters and ultimately kept multiple appeals court nominees from being confirmed.

Delays like this continue to this day. In July, we held another unnecessary cloture vote on a district court nominee. After voting 97-0 to end a debate that no one apparently wanted in the first place, Democrats forced us to delay the confirmation vote by two more days. This was the first time in history that a unanimous cloture vote was not followed immediately by a confirmation vote. It could have taken a few hours, but instead took two weeks from the filing of a cloture motion to the final unanimous confirmation vote.