On Friday and extending past midnight into Saturday, the Senate, before recessing for the year, confirmed nine of President Biden’s district-court nominees. As the Administration’s supporters have been understandably eager to tout, that took Biden’s total judicial confirmations for the year to 40—the highest first-year total since Ronald Reagan’s 41 in 1981. Reagan’s total included Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, so Biden tied Reagan on the number of lower-court confirmations.
Biden’s supporters are less eager to highlight that Biden owes his high numbers largely to a rule change by Mitch McConnell that they opposed. In April 2019, in order to overcome Senate Democrats’ obstruction of district-court nominations, McConnell led a successful effort to reduce the number of post-cloture hours of debate on district-court nominations from thirty to two. In the first three months of 2019, the Senate confirmed zero district-court nominees. In the final nine months of that year, it confirmed eighty.
To illustrate how the rule change helped Biden: Biden’s 40 first-year confirmations consisted of 11 federal appellate nominees and 29 district nominees. By contrast, while President Trump had only 19 first-year confirmations, he actually had one more appellate nominee confirmed (12 total) than Biden did, as well as a Supreme Court justice, but a mere six district nominees. So Biden’s ratio of district nominees confirmed to appellate nominees confirmed is roughly six times higher than Trump’s.
It’s also worth noting that every single one of Biden’s confirmed district nominees came from a state with two Democratic senators (or, in one instance, from the District of Columbia), so the White House did not have to work out favorable blue-slip approvals with any home-state Republican senators. (Yes, the blue slip remains in full force for district-court nominees, just as it did throughout Trump’s presidency.) Indeed, Biden has not yet made a district-court nomination to a state with two Republican senators. (Of his 26 district-court nominations that were pending when the Senate recessed, 23 were from states with two Democratic senators, and three were from Ohio, which has one Democratic senator and one Republican senator.)