In recent years a subject of continuing interest to Congress has been the length of time taken for lower court nominations to receive Senate confirmation. Most recently, during the 111 th and 112 th Congresses, Senate debate on this subject has concerned whether President Obama's nominees to U.S. circuit or district court judgeships, relative to the judicial nominees of other recent Presidents, have waited longer to receive up-or-down votes by the Senate. Part of this debate, in turn, has focused on the waiting times from nomination to confirmation of President Obama's uncontroversial judicial nominees who have enjoyed bipartisan support in the Senate. Senators, often along party lines, have expressed differing views concerning how long these nominees have waited for Senate confirmation, or on how their waiting times compared with the times that uncontroversial judicial nominees of other recent Presidents waited to be confirmed. On the one hand, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, has criticized the wait time for President Obama's uncontroversial judicial nominees as generally being much too long. In March 2010, Senator Leahy stated that the Senate had "wasted weeks and months having to seek time agreements in order to consider nominations that were reported by the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously and who are then confirmed overwhelmingly by the Senate once they are finally allowed to be considered." This year, Senator Leahy raised the issue again, arguing that the treatment of President Obama's nominees "amounted to months of unnecessary delays" for "judicial nominations who should be noncontentious." He argued that the Senate minority had engaged in "across-the-board stalling of judicial nominees," which he said had "led to the backlog in confirmations and the months of delays in the consideration of consensus nominees." By contrast, Senator Chuck Grassley—the ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee—has argued that President Obama's judicial nominees have not been treated differently by the Senate relative to the nominees of President Obama's predecessors. The Senate, Senator Grassley maintained recently, continues to confirm "consensus district judge nominees" in a manner consistent with past Senate practice. Senator Grassley has also argued that the pace of the Senate's consideration of President Obama's judicial nominees, uncontroversial or otherwise, has itself been affected by the pace at which the President has submitted nominations to the Senate, stating that "Republicans have been more than fair to this President and his judicial nominees, considering the fact that we have so many vacancies that have not had a nominee submitted to the Senate for our consideration." This report seeks to inform the current debate by analyzing the time taken by the Senate during recent presidencies to confirm uncontroversial circuit and district court nominees. It is comprised of four sections: A first section explains the methodology used to identify what, for purposes of this report, are regarded as "uncontroversial" lower court nominees. The section also shows, from the Reagan presidency to the Obama presidency, the percentage of circuit and district court nominees approved by the Senate and who, according to the methodology used in the report, qualify as uncontroversial. A second section calculates the average and median lengths of time from nomination to confirmation for President Obama's uncontroversial circuit and district court nominees approved by the Senate. These times are compared with the corresponding average and median waiting times to confirmation for the uncontroversial judicial nominees of Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. The average and median waiting times from nomination to confirmation, the section finds, generally increased from one presidency to the next for uncontroversial circuit and district court nominees. A third section analyzes, again for uncontroversial confirmed circuit and district court nominees of Presidents Reagan to Obama, the percentage of nominees who waited specified amounts of time from nomination to Senate confirmation. Shown by presidency are the percentages of uncontroversial judicial nominees who waited, from first nomination to confirmation, (1) fewer than 100 days, (2) from 100 too 199 days, and (3) 200 or more days. This section finds, among other things, that fewer than 1 in 10 of the uncontroversial confirmed lower court nominees of the two earliest Presidents included in the analysis (Reagan and G.H.W. Bush) waited 200 or more days to be confirmed. By contrast, more than half of President Obama's uncontroversial confirmed judicial nominees (for both circuit and district court judgeships) waited 200 or more days to receive Senate approval. A fourth section identifies various institutional and political factors that possibly influenced the increase across the five most recent presidencies in the length of time uncontroversial circuit and district court nominees waited from nomination to confirmation. A concluding section identifies several potential implications of longer waiting times from nomination to confirmation for uncontroversial judicial nominees. For purposes of this report, determining whether circuit or district court nominees were "uncontroversial" was based on the level of support they had from Senators of both parties when their nominations were reported by the Senate Judiciary Committee and when their nominations were approved by the full Senate. Specifically, the nominees were identified as uncontroversial if (1) their nominations were reported out of the Judiciary Committee favorably either by voice vote or by a unanimous roll call vote, and (2) their nominations were approved by the full Senate by voice vote, or if a roll call vote was held, approved with 5 or fewer nay votes. All of a President's confirmed uncontroversial nominees are included in the analysis, regardless of whether such nominees were confirmed during his first or, when applicable, second term. In the handful of instances when a nominee met the criteria described above but for whose nomination the number of days, from nomination to confirmation, exceeded 1,000 days, his or her nomination was excluded from the analysis. These nominations were excluded because, in each case, there was initial controversy surrounding them, prior to committee consideration, involving opposition to the nominees by one or both of their home state Senators. Ultimately, after unusually long wait times that exceeded 1,000 days, the nominees were all confirmed, with the initial controversies surrounding their nominations not captured in the Judiciary Committee's votes to report or in the final Senate votes to confirm. Additionally, for purposes of this report, a nominee was not considered uncontroversial if a committee roll call vote on his or her nomination included one or more nay votes. By registering formal opposition to the nominee in committee, such votes, for the purposes of this report, were an indication of some level of controversy that, to some degree, might be expected to follow the nominee for the remainder of the Senate confirmation process. A nominee on the other hand, was for purposes of this report, identified as uncontroversial if approved by the Judiciary Committee in a voice vote in which one or more committee members nonetheless voted nay. The fact that, in such instances, a committee roll call vote was not requested in which to formally record opposition to the nomination, and a voice vote was taken instead, was, for purposes of this report, an indicator that little or no controversy was attached to the nominee. It should be noted that if a nominee is considered "uncontroversial" according to the criteria described above, it does not mean necessarily that there were no concerns voiced by Senators about his or her nomination during the confirmation process. It simply means, however, that these concerns were not expressed as formal nay votes when the Senate Judiciary Committee or full Senate voted on the nomination (and, as discussed above, the Senate approved the nomination in under 1,000 days). The report focuses exclusively on the length of time that judicial nominees identified as uncontroversial took to receive Senate confirmation. Outside the scope of the report's analysis, therefore, are the relatively small number of other judicial nominees who, by virtue of being reported out of committee by voice vote or unanimous roll call vote, also could be regarded as uncontroversial, but who were ultimately not confirmed by the Senate. The report as well does not examine another relatively small group of circuit and district court nominees who might be identified as having been uncontroversial while pending in committee, but who nonetheless were not reported by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Finally, the methodology used in the report to identify uncontroversial nominees is one possible approach for identifying such nominees. Analyses employing different criteria (including the number of nay votes a nominee receives on the floor when confirmed by the Senate) may yield different findings and conclusions. In general, there appears to be a strong relationship between the type of committee vote a nominee received (e.g., voice vote, etc.) and the level of bipartisan support a nominee later received when approved by the full Senate. For example, of President Obama's 22 confirmed circuit court nominees who were reported out of committee by voice vote or a unanimous roll call vote, 16 (or 72.7%) were confirmed by voice vote or, when a roll call vote was held, received zero nay votes. The remaining 6 nominees were confirmed with 5 or fewer nay votes. In contrast, of the 8 confirmed Obama circuit court nominees who received at least 1 nay vote when they were reported out of committee (by roll call vote), 5 received at least 20 nay votes when confirmed by the Senate (and another nominee received 16 nay votes). The strong relationship between the type of committee vote a nominee received and the level of bipartisan support a nominee later received when confirmed by the full Senate existed during this period for other presidencies as well. Finally, as Figure 1 reveals, a majority of each President's judicial nominees approved by the Senate, met the criteria as being uncontroversial described above.