Republicans can try to say it ain’t so, but a newly developed statistical measure says it is: The GOP’s delaying tactics and outright obstruction of President Obama’s judicial nominees have reached epic proportions. According to Greg Sargent, at the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog:
Dr. Sheldon Goldman, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts who focuses on judicial nominations, has developed what he calls an “Index of Obstruction and Delay” designed to measure levels of obstructionism.
Goldman calculates his Index of Obstruction and Delay by adding together the number of unconfirmed nominations, plus the number of nominations that took more than 180 days to confirm (not including nominations towards the end of a given Congress) and dividing that by the total number of nominations. During the last Congress, Goldman calculates, the Index of Obstruction and Delay for Obama circuit court nominations was 0.9524.
“That’s the highest that’s ever been recorded,” [says Goldman]. “In this last Congress it approached total obstruction or delay.”
By comparison, Goldman ran the same measurement on the 108th Congress, from 2003-2004, when George W. Bush was president, and Republicans controlled the Senate. The Index of Destruction and Delay for that period was a much lower 0.6176.
Anybody who’s been paying attention could have guessed that. But it’s helpful to see the hard numbers.