Yesterday, the Senate confirmed Judges Jacqueline Nguyen, Kristine Gerhard Baker, and John Lee to the Ninth Circuit and to federal trial courts in Arkansas and Illinois — bringing to a close a 14 judge deal Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) forced Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to strike when Reid threatened to force 17 votes to break Senate Republican filibusters of 17 different nominees. As we explained two months ago when this deal was struck, the deal represents a significant uptick in the rate of confirmations under President Obama, but it is far from enough to undo the three year campaign of obstructionism McConnell led the minute President Obama took office.

According to the Federal Judicial Center, Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both had very similar judicial confirmation rates — 201 lower court judges were confirmed during Clinton’s first term, and 204 judges were confirmed under Bush. President Obama, by contrast, has seen only 142 judges confirmed so far according to the FJC’s data — or less than four judges for each month of his presidency. In order to catch up to his two predecessors, Obama will need to double that rate to about 7.5 judges a month for the rest of his current term.

The recently completed deal, however, proves that this rate is achievable. Indeed, 7.5 judges a month is almost exactly the rate of confirmations achieved under this deal. There is simply no reason why the Senate cannot repeat its recent performance and catch up to a normal rate of confirmations by the time either Obama or Mitt Romney takes the oath of office next January.

Earlier this month, Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) announced that he would unilaterally veto Judge Elissa Cadish’s nomination to a federal judgeship in Nevada because she once refused to misrepresent the law in a way that favored the NRA. Heller believes he can carry the gun lobby’s water in this way because of an odd Senate tradition called “blue slips,” which currently allows either one of a judicial nominee’s home state senators to prevent that nominee from receiving a hearing in the Judiciary Committee.

This tradition, however, does not exactly have a longstanding pedigree. During the Reagan and the first Bush Administration, the blue slip tradition did indeed allow home state senators to block a judicial nominee, but only if both of these senators agreed. Indeed, this rule remained in effect until 1995, when Senate Republicans unilaterally changed it to make it easier to block President Clinton’s nominees with only one objecting senator — only to change back to Reagan Era rules once George W. Bush took office.

Heller now seems to think that, because a Democratic president is back in office, he should have the same power to unilaterally veto nominees that didn’t exist under Ronald Reagan or most of George W. Bush’s term. Fortunately, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) apparently thinks otherwise:

Reid, the Senate majority leader, said he plans to ask Leahy to bypass the blue slip process in this case and move forward with the Cadish nomination. He said the two could meet Thursday.

Reid said his staff has compiled clippings and other material on Cadish that he plans to show to Leahy.

“Leahy is a traditionalist around here,” Reid said. “I’ve gotten all the articles about this together and am going to visit with Pat and go over it, but I don’t think he will do it.“

There’s nothing wrong with being a traditionalist, but there’s also no real tradition giving Heller a unilateral veto over nominees. If one set of rules were good enough for Ronald Reagan, than they should be good enough for Barack Obama.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions knows something about what it means to be unfit for the federal bench. In 1986, the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected Session’s nomination to a federal judgeship in Alabama after a Justice Department attorney revealed that Sessions called the NAACP and the ACLU “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” Unfortunately, rather than gaining some humility from this incident, the now-Sen. Sessions seems to be finding questionably qualified nominees under every rock he can lift:

Sessions was one of [Justice Elena] Kagan’s toughest critics on the Senate Judiciary Committee when she was nominated by President Obama in 2010. Last week, he revived his complaints about her when he became one of only two committee members to vote against Maine lawyer William J. Kayatta Jr., whom Obama nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit.

Kayatta’s transgression, according to Sessions, is that he was the lead investigator for the American Bar Association panel that gave nominee Kagan its highest rating — “Unanimous Well-Qualified.”

Given that Kagan had never been a judge and had little experience in private practice, Sessions said, such a rating “was not only unsupported by the record but, in my opinion, the product of political bias.”

For the record, Justice Kagan was the sitting Solicitor General, a former Dean of the Harvard Law School, a former White House attorney and senior policy staffer and a former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall when she was nominated to the Supreme Court. The idea that she wasn’t well qualified for her current job is absurd.

Shortly after President Obama announced that he would recess appoint four officials in order to prevent Senate Republicans from effectively shutting down two key agencies through a filibuster, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) compared Obama’s actions to Pearl Harbor and promised a scorched earth campaign of obstruction against every one of the president’s nominees.

Fortunately, even most of Lee’s fellow Republican senators deemed Lee’s tantrum to be overblown. Last February, when the Senate voted to confirm Judge Cathy Ann Bencivengo shortly after Lee announced his obstruction campaign, only five of Lee’s colleagues joined him. Yesterday, the Senate voted to confirm Judge Stephanie Thacker to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and Lee was only able to convince Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and David Vitter (R-LA) to join him in opposition. Even Tea Party stalwarts like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) who joined Lee in opposing Bencivengo, broke with Lee on Thacker.

The Hill reports that, in return for a promise that President Obama will not make any recess appointments in the upcoming Senate break, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) agreed to stop obstructing several of the president’s nominees:

“As the result of a successful discussion among the minority leader, the White House and myself there will be no recess appointments during the coming adjournment,” said [Majority Leader Harry] Reid, speaking from the Senate floor.

In return, Republicans allowed passage by unanimous consent of several of President Obama’s noncontroversial nominees and allowed Reid to set up a vote on the confirmation of Stephanie Thacker to be a circuit judge for the Fourth Circuit for April 16, the day the Senate returns from its break.

It is, of course, unfortunate that Reid needs to strike a deal at all before the caucus that controls less than half the seats in the Senate will deign to allow completely noncontroversial nominees to move forward. Nevertheless, this incident proves the wisdom of Obama’s decision to make several recess appointments earlier this year despite McConnell’s objections. Prior to Obama’s actions, he and Reid had few bargaining chips they could use to prevent McConnell’s obstructionism in a Senate ruled by the filibuster. Now, Obama and Reid can use the threat of future recess appointments to ensure that the party that voters did not want to control the Senate does not have a total veto power over the president’s nominees.

One in ten federal judgeships are currently vacant, a reality that has crippled many federal courts. As ABA president Bill Robinson recently explained, “[d]elay at the federal courts puts people’s lives on hold while they wait for their cases to be resolved. Businesses face uncertainty and costly holdups, preventing them from investing and creating jobs. In sum, judicial vacancies kill jobs.”

Of  course, this problem has an easy solution — confirm the people President Obama nominated to fill these vacant seats. Presently, nineteen nominees have cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee. Twelve of these judges cleared the committee without a single objection, and five more were voted out of the committee with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) as the only objector. Lee, of course, recently promised to oppose every single one of Obama’s nominees, and he also believes that national child labor laws, Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional — so his opinion of a nominee’s qualifications for the bench are not really entitled to any weight.

Yesterday, a wave of Democratic senators spoke out of the Senate floor about the growing vacancy crisis and the need to confirm these pending nominees, so it is clear that some action is coming on these nominees. When it comes — and it should not wait one second longer than it needs to — Senate Republicans will have a choice. They can either serve the American people by confirming a slate of judges that no reasonable person has lodged a single objection to, or they can prove that they care about nothing more than obstructionism by blocking these votes.