One of the arguments regarding the President’s judicial nominations vis-a-vis Senate Democrats and their filibustering ways is that the Senate has confirmed 200-some of Bush’s nominations, so what’t the big deal about blocking ten?

The main reason I find the argument annoying is because it lumps district court nominations in with appeals court nominations. They aren’t the same thing. To lump them together is like saying a particular high school produced 50 professional quarterbacks, and then learning that 48 of them play in Arena League and two played in the NFL. Aggregations of unlike, albeit related, categories obfuscate what a given set of numbers mean.

Another reason I find the argument annoying is that it really isn’t an argument. Just because the Senate has approved X, and has not approved Y, does not mean that the approval of X justifies or explains the rejection of Y, even if X is far larger than Y. In short: the citation of such numbers is diversionary, and does not address the issue at hand.

I have also found that it is harder than it should be to find out exactly how many nominations Bush made in each category, and whether they were confirmed or not. After some digging I found the following:

• USDOJ: OLP: Judicial Nominations, the 109th

• USDOJ: OLP: Nominations, the 108th
• USDOJ: OLP: Judicial Nominations, the 107
• And here’s another list from the 108th Congress and the 107th.
  

By looking at the lists (and in some cases having to count), we find that in the 108th 34 nominations were made and 18 were confirmed and in the 107th it was 32 and 17. The success rate for Bush’s Appeals Court nominees is, therefore, roughly 53%.

For the 107th Congress, his succes rate for District Court nominees was about 84%–and hence you can see how the aggregate numbers inflate the success rate. I don’t have the 108th Congress’ figures on District Court nominees, as the DOJ page only has the list and no summary table and I am not in the mood to count.

All of this is interesting, of course, but as I noted above, it still doesn’t really tell us much, one way or another, about the merits of the Democrat’s blockage of a significant number of Appeals Court nominees. Nor, for that matter, does it tell use anything about the merits of the GOP position.

I will grant that some historical data on success rates would be interesting as well, but I am too tired at the moment, so maybe later.

I would also note that the general lack of reporting on these numbers, but rather the lazy citation of the approvals (i.e., the 200+ figure) verses the rejections (i.e, 10) bespeaks of the poor quality of reporting and research on this story.