Assembly Line Politics: How Judicial Confirmations Became a Partisan Assembly Line
Research Poster Social & Behavioral Sciences 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Morrgan Herlihy
Exhibition Number 203
Abstract
How has institutional reform altered the advice and consent process? For much of the last century, lower court confirmations in the Senate largely proceeded with little public scrutiny. However, beginning with the first Trump administration, long-standing trends in judicial confirmations shifted dramatically. Presidents and their Senate allies now move quickly to fill vacancies, with confirmations averaging less than six months-- half the time it took during the Obama and Bush administrations. Hearings have become highly contentious, partisan events drawing increased participation from senators and greater attention from interest groups. I argue that institutional reforms to cloture procedures in November of 2013 fundamentally altered the advice and consent process by permitting presidents and their Senate allies to prioritize ideological entrenchment over bipartisan consensus. To examine this shift, I leverage the Judiciary Committee’s investigative role in this process to develop and test a theory of senatorial scrutiny. Using an original dataset of over 29.000 questions from senators and nominee responses, I analyze how filibuster reform shaped the issues senators raise with nominees, including a shift away from personalized questions toward messaging, as well as how nominee responsiveness changed in the post-filibuster era. By investigating how the Senate’s institutions channel political power in judicial confirmations, this project underscores the how reforms intended to streamline legislative processes can erode democratic safeguards. In this case, lowering the cloture threshold has given presidents and their party greater control of judicial selection, raising important questions about the long-term consequences for judicial independence and the constitution's checks-and-balances.
Importance
This project represents the first large-scale quantitative analysis of written questions, including over 29,0000 submissions by Senators covering 251 judicial nominees from the George W. Bush administration through the Biden presidency. Recently, researchers have challenged the perception of confirmation hearings as “vapid and hollow charades,” instead arguing that they play an active role in supporting the judiciary in two important ways: the reinforcement of legal norms and fostering public discussions of constitutional law. My research builds on this recent wave of scholarship but pushes this research frontier forward by (1) analyzing an understudied portion of the confirmation process—written questions—and (2) demonstrating how institutional reform affects the information gathering strategies of Senators when considering lifetime appointments to the federal judiciary.