Senator McConnell, under tremendous pressure from his own conference, has cancelled all but one week of the August recess, the first week of August.
There are two giant reasons.
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Keep vulnerable Democratic incumbent Senators in Washington and off the campaign trail.
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Use those extra weeks to ram through as many Article III Judicial nominees as possible.
It is very likely that if Democrats take the Senate in November, they will stop all consideration of appellate Article III nominations and greatly limit consideration of trial Article III nominations. Republicans are facing a potential iron wall that will settle in place at noon on January 3, 2019, if they don’t maintain control of the Senate. With that in mind, they are going to ram through as many nominees now as is humanly possible.
There are currently 10 pending Court of Appeals nominations, 2 on the floor, 8 more in committee. Those will be the priority and I am certain all 10 will be pushed through.
There are currently 70 pending District Court nominations,35 on the floor and 35 more in committee.
Republicans will NOT be able to get all those nominees through in the time remaining, unless they invoke the nuclear option and reduce the post cloture debate time limit, currently 30 hours, which greatly limits the number of nominees the Senate can consider in a fixed time period. I think the Republican conference will demand this change. If this change is made, then they will be able to get all 70 confirmed, plus maybe additional nominations that 'Trump may make in the next month. Pretty much June would be the cutoff. Any nominations occurring after June are not going to get a vote in this Congress. To this point, 'Trump has had 41 judges confirmed. So it is plain to see that Republicans need to change the rules if they want to get all their currently pending judges through.
