President Donald Trump has little patience for the workings of democracy.
He cries that Democrats are obstructing his judicial nominations—“the Democrats are holding them up beyond anything. Beyond comprehension, they’re holding them up,” he said of “some of the most qualified people ever, and they’re waiting forever on line—and that Senate Republicans should thus use their slim majority to scrap blue slips, the longstanding bipartisan tradition in which home state senators sign off on nominees, to speed his nominees through.
But in fact Trump has been nominating judges at a fast clip, and so far he’s gotten seven judicial nominees confirmed out of the 57 whose names he’s put forward. President Obama’s had just three judges confirmed by this point in 2009, and his party, too, controlled the senate.