There are 34 district-court nominations pending on the Senate floor. Fourteen of those 34 nominations first reached the Senate floor between January and July of last year.

The primary reason for the extraordinary blockage is Senate Democrats’ insistence on cloture votes for all of the nominees. The Senate rules currently provide for the same thirty hours of post-cloture debate on district-court nominees as on appellate nominees. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is able to dedicate the potential floor time to the much smaller number of appellate nominees, but he can’t do so for district nominees.

It appears that the only way to break the blockage is to reduce the hours of post-cloture debate on district-court nominees from thirty to, say, two. That’s what then-majority leader Harry Reid did, with strong Republican support, in January 2013 for the 113th Congress. (The same resolution reduced the hours of post-cloture debate on most executive-branch nominees from thirty to eight.) Majority leader McConnell can’t count on any Democratic support now, so he would have to use the same simple majority power that Reid used in November 2013 to abolish the filibuster for lower-court and executive-branch nominees (and that McConnell used to abolish the Supreme Court filibuster in April 2017).