The Senate Tuesday reached agreement on a deal paving the way for seven Obama nominees to be confirmed without Democrats resorting to the so-called "nuclear option" ending the 60 vote supermajority required by a filibuster. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave credit where he thought it was due. "John McCain is the reason we're at the point we are," Reid acknowledged, adding that the Arizona Republican had acted "at his own peril." Judging by the reaction among right-wing blog commenters and think tanks, many of McCain's conservative allies aren't very happy about it.

Of course, if this story sounds familiar, it should. As it turns out, back in 2005 John McCain led the bipartisan Gang of 14 in reaching an agreement that enabled confirmation of several Bush judicial selections while maintaining the filibuster for the future. And conservatives who fumed at his betrayal ("a nightmare" by a "bunch of m-fing cowards" which "caves to liberals") calmed down when they realized John McCain had preserved Republicans' ability to block President Obama's judicial nominations at a record rate.
Among the first to reach that conclusion were Adam White and Kevin White. While their Weekly Standard colleague Dean Barnett detailed McCain's "uncanny ability to drive virtually all conservatives nuts," the two Whites lauded his leadership in the "Gang of 14" that saved the filibuster precisely because it preserved the ability of a Republican minority to block future Democratic judicial nominations:

Finally, it must be noted that McCain's opposition to the nuclear option did not merely serve short-term conservative interests in the specific context of Bush's nominations; rather, it served long-term conservative interests in the federal bench generally. As McCain has warned, there will come a day--perhaps soon--when a Democratic president will nominate decidedly non-conservative justices and judges, and a Democratic Senate majority will want desperately to confirm them. When that moment arrives, conservatives will call on the Republican minority to utilize every tool in the Senate minority playbook to thwart those nominations--especially the filibuster...preservation of the filibuster threat may ultimately prevent the ascent of Supreme Court judges that Laura Ingraham and Rick Santorum would dearly regret.

They were spot on. Within days of Barack Obama's victory in November 2008, Jon Kyl--the number two Senate Republican who President Bush had praised in 2005 "for making sure the judges I nominate get a fair hearing and an up or down vote on the floor of the United States Senate"--announced he would filibuster "if Obama follows through on his pledge to nominate someone who takes into account human suffering and employs empathy from the bench." As it turned out, Kyl had plenty of company among his Republican colleagues. In June 2011, ThinkProgress cited research by the Alliance for Justice to explain the GOP's unprecedented obstructionism:

[T]he Senate confirmed fewer of [Obama's] district and circuit nominees than every president back to Jimmy Carter, and the lowest percentage of nominees - 58% - than any president in American history at this point in a President's first term. By comparison, Presidents George W. Bush, Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Reagan and Carter had 77%, 90%, 96%, 98%, and 97% of their nominees confirmed after two years, respectively.
Senate Republicans' mass obstruction of Obama's judges stands in stark contrast to the treatment afforded to past presidents. Indeed, the Senate confirmed fewer judges during Obama's first two years in office than it did during the same period in the Carter Administration, even though the judiciary was 40 percent smaller while Carter was in office.

As dismal as that record was, it was actually an improvement from a year earlier, when only 43 percent of President Obama's judicial appointments had been confirmed.
To be sure, as Dylan Matthews documented in the Washington Post, President Obama has not helped himself with his often glacial pace of judicial nominations. But Republican obstructionism has played a critical role in the serious understaffing of the federal bench, especially at the district court level (where Bush nominees on average waited only 54 days from Judiciary Committee hearing to an actual floor vote, while Obama's picks languished for 139.)
But that these roadblocks still exist at all is in large part because of the efforts of John McCain in 2005 and again this week. No doubt, Republicans will want the situation to stay that way. Until, that is, one of their own wins back the White House.