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 administrations on the issue of circuit- court judges, using information compiled by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service:

In four years, Bush I nominated 54 people to the circuit courts. Forty- two of them were confirmed, for an overall confirmation rate of 78 percent. The numbers, when broken down, show a dramatic change between Bush's early years in office and those that followed. In his first two years, Bush nominated 23 people, of whom 22 were confirmed, for a confirmation rate of 92 percent. In his last two years, Bush nominated 31 people, of whom 20 were confirmed -- a rate of 65 percent.

Clinton, during his entire eight years in office, nominated 90 people for places on the circuit courts. He withdrew three of them for various reasons (he discovered problems with the nominations after making them), so the total should actually be 87 nominees. Of that number, 65 were confirmed, for an overall confirmation rate of 75 percent. Breaking that down, in Clinton's first two years in office, when he had a Democratic Senate, he nominated 22 people and had 19 confirmed, a confirmation rate of 87 percent. From 1995 until 2000, when the Senate was under Republican control, Clinton nominated 65 people and had 46 confirmed -- a rate of 71 percent.

The bottom line is that 78 percent of Bush I's circuit-court nominees were confirmed by an opposition-party Senate, while 71 percent of President Clinton's nominees were confirmed by an opposition-party Senate. The difference can probably be attributed to two things. One, Republicans were not in power in Clinton's first two years; had they been, they probably would have confirmed at a rate higher than 71 percent. And two, Clinton's final years were poisoned by scandal and intense political fighting; the president was impeached, and 50 Republican senators voted to remove him from office.

Even so, the figures for Bush I and Clinton are in the same ballpark. And that suggests that there is, for want of a better phrase, an acceptable level of violence that the party in control of the Senate can inflict on the judicial nominees of a president of the other party. Two or three of every ten circuit-court nominees don't make it to the bench.

The problem today, as Republicans see it, is that Democrats are applying the standards of late-term presidencies to George W. Bush's first years in office. Unless Leahy speeds things up, it is possible that the Senate will confirm just half of the president's circuit-court nominees in his first two years in office -- a dramatically low rate. "What they are doing is taking the election-year slowdown tactic and applying it to the first couple of years of this administration," says one GOP aide. "And that's a change in ground rules that we haven't ever seen."

Perhaps more worrisome is that if Leahy continues with his tactics, the new, slower rate of confirmations may become the norm for future presidents in their first years in office. Then the rate will fall even farther as the president ends his term. The result will be fewer judges confirmed and a significant escalation of White House-Senate warfare.

What can Republicans do about it? As most see it, they have just two options. The first is to make Democrats pay a political price for not confirming nominees. That's easy to say and hard to do: It appears that Democrats paid little, if any, price for their decision to kill the circuit-court nomination of Charles Pickering, and Republicans are not optimistic about making judicial nominations a hot political issue. That leaves the second option: winning back the Senate in November. Both the Bush White House and Senate Republicans know it is the only way to ensure that most of the president's nominees make it onto the bench. If Republicans fail, they will likely face more long years of frustration.