The results aren’t pretty.
Here’s a chart showing the number of successful Senate confirmations through the end of February in each Congress:
Confirmations for executive branch and other positions (regulators, ambassadors, etc.) reached just 175, the lowest since at least 1988; for district court, circuit court and Supreme Court judgeships, the number was 16, also the lowest since at least 1988 (though it was tied with 2010).
I also have annual judgeship data going back much further, to 1929, via the Alliance for Justice. These numbers refer to calendar years instead, and look even worse:
In 2015, just 11 judges were confirmed, the fewest since 1960. And note that in 1960, there were only about a third as many total authorized Article III judgeships as there are today, meaning that the Senate likely had fewer openings to fill back then.
Why are senators twiddling their thumbs rather than doing their jobs and confirming literally hundreds of waiting nominees?
To some extent senators are waiting for the next president to pick his or her people instead (as with the Supreme Court opening); to some extent they maybe just can’t get their act together; to some extent they may be trying to make the federal government as dysfunctional as possible under President Obama; and to some extent they may be trying to avoid angering their base during an election season by cooperating as little as possible with the sitting president.
Earlier this year, for example, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) indicated that he would not move any nominees out of the Senate Banking Committee, which he chairs, until his primary was over. And he kept his word: Up until March, the committee had not reported out a single nominee this Congress. That is the first time this has happened in at least 34 years. Since Shelby won his primary in early March, the committee has voted exactly one nominee out.
By the way, the earlier Congressional Research Service report I mentioned also contained data on Senate bills and joint resolutions approved through February, going back about two decades. Those trends don’t look quite as bad, but arguably leaving an existing vacancy unfilled is a different animal than passing an entirely new law or resolution.

