Harry Reid, The Gift That Keeps On Giving

In 2013, faced with a slim majority in the Senate, and itching to usher in ever-wider swathes of state-mandated socialism Right Now!, Majority Leader Harry Reid and his uber-partisan Dimmocrats used the Nuclear Option: they revoked the filibuster rule that had been in place for a century in the Senate, which required 60 votes to end debate and vote on district and appeals court nominees, changing confirmation to a simple majority, which they then had. This rule allowed any side who could garner 41 votes to block anything, requiring that any nominee had to meet a modicum of bipartisanship and even-handedness to make it through the rocks and shoals of the Senate confirmation process. In fairness, it also made federal offices subject to nomination a minefield that ensured only middle-of-the-road lightweight wobble-wagons (like recently-retired SCOTUS Associate Justice Kennedy) could get past during the Senate's "advise and consent" clause festivities, but it also kept the candidates from the fringes of either side on the sidelines.

Reid decided that after the beginning of the second term of HopeyDopey's administration, they wouldn't need that sort of moderating influence thing any more, and decided to go for the whole hog all at once.

In a rare prescient moment for then-Minority Leader Bitch McConjob, he went up to Reid after the vote that ended the rule and quietly told him, "You're going to regret this, and soon."

True to form, the Senate shifted, and the Republican simple majority blocked entire slates of nominees, just as both Democrat majorities and minorities had done to Republican presidents since the Eisenhower administration, even gleefully holding up Obama's lame-duck attempt to slip a liberal activist judge past the goalie and onto SCOTUS to replace recently-deceased conservative bastion Antonin Scalia, when he died mere months before the November elections in 2016.

Instead, the Senate waited out the election, and then made the simple-majority rule apply to SCOTUS nominees as well as district and appellate court nominees, so after his upset win, Pres. Trump was able to put Neil Gorsuch on the court. Just like they're going to do with Brett Kavanaugh this fall, whether the unhinged Dems like it or not.

As smarmy simpleton Obozo noted in 2009, "Elections have consequences."
Yes...yes, they do.
Gander, meet sauce.

But it gets better still.

(MORDOR ON THE POTOMAC) Senate Republicans broke a record on Wednesday for the number of appeals court judges confirmed during a president's first two years.

Senators voted 50-49 on Andrew Oldham's nomination to be a judge on the 5th Circuit, making him Trump's 23rd circuit court judge confirmed since he took office last year.  

That breaks the previous record set by President George H.W. Bush, who got 22 appeals court judges confirmed during his administration's first two years. 

And as Col. Slade noted at the climactic speech in Scent Of A Woman,

"I'm just getting warmed up!"

What makes it fun is Trump's nominees have all been vetted based on experience, and they're exactly the sort of strict constructionists who never had a chance at nomination under the old Senate rules. They're also young, but even more to the point, they're all appointees to the US Circuit appellate courts, not the district courts, which means they're exactly the people who'll be voting to overrule the district court judicial nonsense from Clinton and Obozo appointed liberal hacks, and due to their age, they'll be doing that for decades after President Trump is dead and buried.

And they're also the go-to bench when future SCOTUS vacancies open up, as future Supreme Court Associate Justice Kavanaugh was.

 

This is the difference between Marquess of Queensbury Rules, and Queens borough rules.