McConnell will also mention a GOP goal to “ensure that the same number of judicial nominees that were confirmed in the final years of the last three administrations are confirmed in the last two years of this one.” By that, he is referring to a document being passed around among Senate Republicans analyzing the last three administrations — Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton — in which the president spent his last two years in office with a Senate of the opposition party. The document says that Clinton won confirmation of 15 appeals court nominees in 1999-2000, Bush won confirmation of 20 such nominees in 1991-1992, and Reagan won confirmation of 17 circuit court nominees in 1987-1988. From that, Republicans are pointing to the average, 17, as the goal for the last two years of George W. Bush. I haven’t checked the numbers for myself, but they seem about right.

Now, the question is, will Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy cooperate? No one I’ve talked to in the Republican judge world believes that he will. After all, majority Democrats confirmed just 17 of the 32 people President Bush nominated to the appeals courts in 2001-2002 — and two of those were Clinton nominees whom Bush re-nominated in an ill-begotten show of goodwill. Now, that was when Bush was new in office and had post-9/11 job approval ratings of more than 80 percent. Now that he’s a lame duck in the mid-30s, does anyone believe Democrats will be even as cooperative as they were in ‘01 and ‘02? The upside is that, if Republicans do truly fight for the president’s nominees, they could bring back judges as a political issue, sure to please a GOP base that has been dismayed at the party’s listless performance on the issue in the last year or two.