Abstract
On November 21, 2013, U.S. Senate Democrats utilized the long threatened “nuclear option,” thereby allowing a simple-majority of the chamber to end debate on lower federal court judicial nominations. Formal theory predicts that this change should permit the president to nominate more ideologically extreme nominees. By comparing President Obama’s nominees before and after the Senate’s change to the confirmation process, we are able to provide the first comprehensive examination of how the nuclear option is likely to impact the ideological makeup of the lower federal courts. We additionally examine the impact of the nuclear option on time to confirmation and nominee success. Our results indicate, while post-nuclear option nominees are not significantly more liberal, they are being confirmed more often and more quickly, allowing Obama and Senate Democrats to more efficiently fill the federal judiciary with Democratic-leaning judges.
About the authors
Christina L. Boyd is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on the quantitative examination of judges and litigants in federal courts.
Michael S. Lynch is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on Congress, inter-branch politics and quantitative methods.
Anthony J. Madonna is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia. His research interests include American political institutions and development, with an emphasis on congressional and presidential politics.
Appendix
To examine the robustness of our results reported in the text, Table 2 reports the results of the above for nominees made only within the 113th Congress. As the table indicates, the results are largely consistent with those reported in the text. Confirmation rate and time to confirmation are both sizably impacted following the nuclear option, with rate of confirmation going up and time to confirmation going down. Time to confirmation does not achieve statistical significance, something that is undoubtedly attributable to the small sample size.
Nominee Ideology, Confirmation Rates, and Time to Confirmation, 2013–2014.
| 113th Congress Nominees (2013–2014) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-Reform | Post-Reform | Difference | |
| Average CF-Score | –0.724 | –0.601 | –0.123 (–0.984) |
| Confirmation Rate | 48.889% | 79.630% | –30.741%a (–4.536) |
| Average Time to Confirmation | 145.364 | 129.671 | 15.693 (1.483) |
T-scores for difference of means and z-scores for difference of proportions tests reported in parentheses. aIndicates significance at the 0.05 level.
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