Updated judicial vacancies tool: big reduction in median time to Senate action
Oct. 16, 2013 — Remapping Debate has updated three tools by which to explore the scope of federal judicial court vacancies and to assess who is responsible for the increasing delay between the occurence of a vacancy and the filling of a seat. Make sure to continue to page two to see our analysis of median time to nomination and median time from nomination to Senate action, comparing the first term of George W. Bush with the first term of Barack Obama, and also presenting similar data for current judicial vacancies. On page three, we have a chart identifying the median number of vacancies during each year from 2001 to the present.
Directly below, we have a comprehensive table on all judicial vacancies that have occurred from 2001 to the present. You can filter these by judicial circuit and by court. You can choose to look at current vacancies or prior vacancies and choose the period of time for which you want to examine vacancies. You can filter vacancies by how long they went without a nomination, by how long a nominee was pending before the Senate, or both. (Unfortunately, the table does not allow for sorting by column.)
You will notice that, for some vacancies, there are multiple nominees listed. That occurs when either nominee is withdrawn in the face of Senate inaction during a Congressional term, or where a nominee that the Senate has not acted upon by the end of Cogressional term is not renominated in the subsequent term. In both cases, we list the "action" as "withdrawn."
For any nominee after the first nominee for a vacancy, we list the "date of vacancy" as the same date as the one on which the previous nominee was withdrawn.
It is important to note that, for calculating times in the multiple nominee circumstance, you must (yourself) add together "days vacant" and "days pending before Senate" for each of the nominees.
The "days vacant" and "days pending" information will automatically update each day, but the status or "action" column is current only as of the dateline above. We will update again early in January.
The data presented were gathered from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and from the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary.
Additional note: In a small number of cases, a nomination may have been made before a vacancy formally existed or a nominee may even have been confirmed prior to the vacancy formally existing. In such instances, we treat the "days vacant" or "days pending" number as zero.
Click here for a key to the codes used to describe each court.
As shown by the table below, there were 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. As such, this number is not directly comparable with the results shown in the other columns.
These data do show do reflect an especially sharp decline from the picture we presented back in March of this year (268 days). What has happened? Over the last several months, the Senate acted on 20 of the 24 vacancies that had been pending in March, eliminating most of the longest-pending vacancies. Added to that, Obama has made 15 new nominations, 12 of them since late-July, including several in September. When each nominee is put on the board, so to speak, the "days pending before Senate" column starts at zero, also contributing to the lowering of the median time.
Since only one of the new nominees has been acted on, median time will begin to grow in the absence of Senate action in the fall.
Time calculations presented here are accurate to October 16, 2013; we will update again early in January.
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
The chart below shows the median number of judicial vacancies in each year, starting with 2001. We have calculated the median for each year based on the vacancies reported each month of the year by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
Source for total number of active federal judgeships: Federal Judicial Center
