Hey, Democrats! Clean up that nomination quagmire.

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe.]( The broken executive-branch nomination and confirmation process is going from bad to worse. The Senate managed to [confirm 12 nominations]( plus a few judges last week, one of its most productive weeks all year. But that was the exception that proves the rule, given that 12 confirmations a week wouldn’t even fill the [805 positions]( that the Partnership for Public Service considers most important. It’s time for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democrats to do something about it. The Senate has confirmed about as many key nominees for President Joe Biden (166 so far) as it had at this point for President Donald Trump’s nominees, but that’s a bit less than half as many as had been confirmed during the first years of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies. As vacancies expert Anne Joseph O’Connell [explained](, while each recent administration has been slow to fill some nominations, the biggest problem is the Senate, since “delays in confirming successful nominations have doubled, jumping from 56 days under Reagan to 112 days under Obama (and 117 days under Trump).” To the extent that this has generated high-profile media coverage, the focus has been on Republican Senator Ted Cruz and his refusal to cooperate with confirmations of noncontroversial nominees to positions in the State Department and [Treasury Department](. That’s a little misleading, however. Placing what Senate tradition calls a “hold” on these positions isn’t magic, and the Senate majority doesn’t have to respect it. What a hold does in practical terms is to object to rapid consideration of a nomination, which prevents it from being approved by unanimous consent or by a quick voice vote. Defeating a hold requires several steps: Filing a cloture petition, then waiting until it’s time to act on that petition, then taking a cloture vote, then waiting through post-cloture debate time, and finally taking a recorded vote. All of that chews up Senate time, and so in normal times the majority and the administration will try to negotiate with the senator who placed the hold to try to work out a deal. But all that is no longer relevant, because Republicans are insisting that almost every nomination must go through those steps. Democrats did much the same thing during Trump’s presidency, although they were somewhat more flexible about it, and Republicans did it in 2014 when Obama was president — before Republicans won the Senate majority and just stopped confirming most nominations. So what Cruz is doing isn’t really different from what Republican leader Mitch McConnell is doing for every single nomination. Except that at least Cruz has a policy demand he appears willing to negotiate (he wants Biden to impose sanctions that would block use of a Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline). McConnell doesn’t; he’s just delaying confirmations because he can, regardless of the damage to executive-branch departments and agencies, and to the influence of the Senate. By my count, there are currently 136 executive-branch civilian nominations currently on the [Senate’s executive calendar]( — which means they are waiting only for a Senate floor vote. Fairly recently, that last step was in most cases a formality, with the real vetting taking place at the committee stage. Sure, there were holds to be negotiated out, and the occasional controversial nomination that would require a significant debate or even, perhaps, a filibuster. But those were exceptions. The Senate executive calendar for Oct. 30, 2001 contained only 18 equivalent posts, well under 100 fewer than the current count, with the difference almost entirely accounting for the differences in total confirmed nominees (past [executive calendars can be found here](). It rapidly got worse. On Nov. 2, 2009, there was 42 pending nominations; on Oct. 30, 2017, 108 nominations were ready for floor votes. (One more point: On Sept. 8, 2014, 11 months after Democrats ended supermajority cloture for executive-branch nominations, there were 139 of these nominations on the executive calendar. It’s hard to compare that with the Halloween totals from the first year of various administrations for a variety of reasons, but it’s safe to say that when Democrats prevented Trump nominations from moving through quickly, they were only doing what McConnell and the Republicans had previously done.) Perhaps without Cruz’s efforts, a few of the 136 might have been cleared. But it’s unlikely many would have been. There are two things Schumer and the Democrats can do. One is simple: The problem is that there’s more to do than they have hours to do it, so Schumer could keep the Senate in session constantly until the backlog is cleared — or until Republicans relent and allow most nominations to be handled rapidly. However, there simply are not enough hours for that to make much of a difference. The more promising option would require Democrats to once again impose Senate reform by majority vote. If all 50 Democrats are willing to do so, they could change Senate practices to further reduce the time it takes for any individual nomination to get through. They could even make it possible to seek bulk cloture on multiple nominations at a time. The bottom line is that the 2013 change from 60 votes to a simple majority for confirming nominations — technically for cutting off debate, but practically Republicans were requiring 60 for every nomination — did not end the filibuster. What it did, instead, is convert these filibusters from a way to stop individual nominees to a blanket slowdown against almost all nominees, in which the majority can clear any specific nominee (provided there are 51 votes) but cannot confirm all the nominations. That’s a disaster for the Senate as a whole, and even for individual Senators. After all, Cruz’s holds are far less powerful because, at the end of the day, they’re no different from standard operating procedure for the minority party when the majority party holds the White House. The best solution would be for McConnell to simply stop filibustering most nominations. That would revive the Senate’s influence, help the government run better, and allow holds to be meaningful. But if that’s not going to happen, Schumer and the Democrats should do what’s necessary to make the process functional. And then we can start worrying about the possibility that a Republican majority in 2023 will stop confirming anyone. Or that a second-term President Trump in 2025 will just not bother sending up any nominees at all and rule by proclamation. 1. Pamela Clouser McCann and Charles R. Shipan on the [upcoming Supreme Court case on nondelegation](. 2. Tressie McMillan Cottom on Kyrsten Sinema and [how politicians present themselves](. 3. Ariel Edwards-Levy on [Biden’s poll numbers](. 4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Conor Sen on [fighting inflation](. 5. Sarah Posner on the history of [school board fights over Black authors](. 6. Anna Wiederkehr on [public opinion and climate](. 7. Jon Grinspan on [Gilded Age politics and ours](. 8. And Adam Serwer on [voting rights and speech in Florida](. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. 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