What is the judicial confirmation process like?

Well, in the past the way that its worked is the president nominates someone and the senators may oppose the person, or even filibuster them if they're very objectionable, but such filibusters were very, very rare, extraordinary circumstances were the buzzword back in the day. Now the filibusters become the rule, and it's only very, very rare nominees who are actually confirmed. This is unprecedented obstructionism and it needs to stop.

Is it strange that fewer than half of President Obama's nominees have been confirmed?

Every recent president has a confirmation rate, the percentage of their nominees who are confirmed, over 80 percent. Reagan's was as high as 93 percent. Obama's confirmation rate is 43 percent. So confirmations have fallen off a cliff since he became president, and we need to see the Senate move these nominees forward or we're just not going to have any judges left.

What's holding up the judicial nominations?

The broken Senate rules are holding it up. The way the Senate rules work is that the minority can delay confirmation on any nominee by up to 60 hours. They can force 60 hours of debate on any one nominee that they want. So if they oppose all of them, that means that to confirm all 48 of Obama's outstanding nominees it would take 120 days of the Senate's time. And that's assuming that we cancel all the recesses, work 24 hours a day, seven days a week with no breaks, working on nothing else but confirming judicial nominations. We simply can't expect Harry Reid to shut down the country and all of its business just to get nominees through, but the only way to fix this is to fix the broken Senate rules.