The 2013 Senate rules change transformed the judicial confirmation process by lowering the effective vote threshold for success. Presidents with supportive Senate majorities may now bypass filibusters and confirm nominees without any minority party votes. The change influences how nominations proceed, the speed of confirmation, success rates, and ultimately the composition of every federal court. We must now reevaluate existing intuitions. Using data on over 2600 lower court nominations between 1981 and 2022, we test theoretical expectations for how the change influenced judicial appointments. We provide evidence of a radically altered confirmation process with key nominations moving through faster, and more successfully, but with a reliance on unified government and cloture for confirmations. These findings have broad implications for filling vacancies in all federal courts and raise concerns for the future of the appointment process generally.
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