The Unconfirmed: War over judges, escalated.

Yes, there are a lot of important issues at stake in the fight between Senate Republicans and Democrats over the president's judicial nominees. But sometimes it's just personal. Take the case of Lawrence Block, a veteran Republican aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Last August, President Bush nominated Block to a place on the federal Court of Claims. Under the unwritten system of senatorial courtesy, Block, who is a favorite of the committee's ranking Republican, Utah senator Orrin Hatch, would receive a swift confirmation with no controversy. After all, what kind of earthshaking matters would he decide on the Court of Claims?

But that's not what has happened. Not only has Block not been confirmed quickly, he is still, more than eight months after his nomination, awaiting any action at all from the committee chairman, Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy. It's a situation that has left Hatch quietly -- and sometimes not so quietly -- seething. "I take it as a direct slap," he said recently, with obvious indignation. Away from the microphones, Hatch has said he expected Leahy to "shove it to me" when Democrats took over the Judiciary Committee last year, but this is going too far.

And it's not just Block. Last summer, Bush nominated three other candidates to the Court of Claims (and one more recently), of whom none has been confirmed. Why are Democrats -- who say they are primarily worried about keeping "extremists" off the crucial federal courts of appeals, just one step below the Supreme Court -- dragging their feet on such low-level appointees? Perhaps they're just "shoving it" to Hatch. But more likely, they're waiting for Hatch to do them a favor in return for committee action. "They know Hatch will make a deal," says one GOP aide. "So they'll sit there and wait until Hatch trades them something for it, and then they'll move." Perhaps Hatch will agree to let a Democratic initiative move quickly through the committee without a fuss. Perhaps it will be something else. In any event, in the end, Block will be confirmed.

The Block story is insider stuff, but it is one measure of the enmity between the parties on the Judiciary Committee. While feelings on both sides seem to be growing more intense, they are also becoming more focused on a single issue: nominations to the courts of appeals. In the past few weeks, Leahy has actually speeded up considerably the confirmations of lower-level federal district judges, so much so that Republicans are no longer complaining about that. But the circuit courts are another story altogether.

So far, the president has nominated 30 candidates for the courts of appeals. Nine have been confirmed. The rate is even worse for Bush's first group of nominees, the eleven circuit-court candidates he sent to the Hill on May 9, 2001. Of that group, just three have been confirmed. None of the other eight has even gotten a hearing in the year since the nominations. All of this has Republicans worried that Leahy has adopted a strategy that will result in the confirmation of historically low numbers of circuit-court judges. And indeed, a look at confirmation rates in recent administrations suggests that they are right.

It's difficult to compare the confirmation records from the administrations of the first President Bush and Bill Clinton. Bush I served just one term, and the Senate was in the hands of the opposition party the entire time. Bill Clinton served his first two years with a Senate of his own party, and then six years with an opposition-party Senate. Historically, a president's first two years are his most productive where getting judges confirmed is concerned. In addition, confirmations often slow during presidential election years, when senators are not interested in approving lots of judges from a president who may not remain in office. That said, this is the comparison between the two ...