As shown by the table below, there are dramatic differences in the handling of judicial vacancies during the first term of George W. Bush and the first term of Barack Obama. The median number of days from the occurence of a vacancy to a nomination increased by 43.95 percent. The median number of days that nominations were pending before the Senate increased by 43.42 percent.
When making these calculations, we treated judicial vacancies that pre-existed the start of a presidential term as starting on the first day of the term (that’s when we started the clock running). We used the last date of the presidential term to stop the clock, even where there hadn’t been a nomination or confirmation.
What about vacancies for which there were more than one nominee? We added together all the time during the presidential term when a nominee was pending before the Senate, and, separately, all the time during the presidential term when there wasn’t a nominee.
The right-most column of the table deals with current vacancies, including those that opened prior to President Obama’s second term (indeed, there are some that occurred prior to President Obama taking office in 2009). For this calculation, we did not adjust the vacancy date.
The time calculations are accurate to March 28, 2013.
As with the comparison of first terms, we added together all the “pending before the Senate” time for each vacancy, regardless of how many nominees there were, and regardless of whether different nominees spanned different presidencies (an unusual, but not unheard of, circumstance). We proceeded analogously with aggregating the “days between vacancy and nomination” numbers.
Source: The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary
