The Well News: Lame-Duck Judicial Rush Centers on States Democrats Just Flipped
This excerpt is from a piece that originally ran on November 11, 2026.
Republicans control the committee and the floor until January. But Faleschini said Democrats can still slow nominees on the floor by refusing unanimous consent for every procedural step, the approach Republicans used at the end of President Joe Biden’s term, which ended in a deal that confirmed some nominees but not others.
He urged Democrats to look further back for a model for the next two years. When Republicans controlled the Senate during President Barack Obama’s final two years, the Senate confirmed 22 of Obama’s judicial nominees, Faleschini said. Thirteen of those were consensus picks carried over from the previous Congress, which left nine new ones.
“If Republicans go ahead and break all these rules … just subtract that number from the nine,” he said, “and that’s how many you give them in the next two years. Meaning, probably not many, if any at all.”
Grassley expects as much. “Democrats clearly intend to use their newfound power next Congress to wage an obstruction campaign,” he wrote, noting that the committee’s incoming Democratic chairman has called for a “hard reset on the nominations process.”
“The stakes are far too high for Republicans to take their feet off the gas now,” he wrote.
Faleschini acknowledged that tit-for-tat has a cost. “You can’t just have one party abiding by one set of norms and another party abiding by another set of norms,” he said. “At the same time, that … keeps leading us down a bad path, one that isn’t good for the public.”
Faleschini said he wants a return to bipartisan vetting, but that it can’t happen with only one side. He blamed the White House’s judicial selection team and outside allies such as Mike Davis of the Article III Project for refusing to compromise. “There is going to be no reaching of deals as long as those are the kinds of people that are your voice inside of the White House,” he said.