The battle over the government shutdown is only the most visible display of partisanship in Washington, D.C. Senate Democrats are also working hard to minimize President Trump’s appointments to both the judicial and executive branches.

The appointment process has two parts: nomination by the president and approval, or confirmation, by the Senate. The confirmation process also has two parts, consideration first by the relevant committee and then by the full Senate. And Senate consideration also has two parts, ending debate and a final confirmation decision.

The president controls nominations, and the Senate majority controls committee consideration. The Senate and its rules, however, are designed so that the minority party can become a real player when a nomination reaches the full Senate. Today, Senate Democrats are playing this spoiler role for all it’s worth by using Senate rules to delay, for as long as possible, nominations they lack the votes to defeat.

The Senate must end debate, or invoke cloture, on a nomination before it can decide on confirmation. Senate Rule 22 limits to 30 hours further consideration of “any matter on which cloture has been invoked.” Since invoking clotures shows that a nomination has enough support for confirmation, this post-cloture debate is usually irrelevant, and in the past, the Senate would often vote on confirmation on the same day that cloture was invoked.

No longer. Indeed, Senate Democrats are using both parts of Rule 22, taking a cloture vote and post-cloture debate time, far beyond anything that has been done in the past. And since invoking cloture today requires the same simple majority as confirmation, the only reason to demand cloture votes and then drag out post-cloture debate is to obstruct nominations that are sure to lead to confirmation anyway.

Between 1949, when Rule 22 was applied to nominations, and the end of the Obama administration, only 5 percent of judicial nominations had a cloture vote before they were confirmed. In the first two years under President Trump, that has jumped more than eleven-fold, to nearly 57 percent. Before Trump’s election, when cloture was invoked on judicial nominations, a confirmation vote followed on the same day 41 percent of the time. Today, that has sunk to below 20 percent.

Republicans are considering addressing this through a rules change. While changing the actual text of the Senate’s written rules requires 67 votes, changing the interpretation of that text requires only a simple majority. It’s called the “nuclear option.” Democrats used it in 2013 to lower the threshold for cloture on nominations from “three-fifths” (which is what the text of the rule actually says) to a simple majority. All it took was the Senate voting to approve a ruling by the Senate’s presiding officer and, presto, 60=51.

Senators should consider whether this is the right way to run this institution, or any institution or organization for that matter. Having rules that say one thing, but pretending they say something else, cheapens the very notion that rules are important at all.

“Three-fifths” doesn’t mean “simple majority,” and “thirty” doesn’t mean either “eight” or “two.” Conservatives, after all, criticize judges who change statutes or the Constitution by changing their meaning. In a 1937 dissent, Justice George Sutherland warned against “amendment in the guise of interpretation.”

But if Republicans do decide to take this step, 2014 can provide a benchmark for what to expect. In 2014, like this year, the same party controlled both the White House and the Senate. A year earlier, the Senate had voted 78–16 to temporarily change Rule 22, thereby reducing the number of hours of post-cloture debate in exactly the same way that Republicans may do today. The only difference between 2014 and 2019 is that vacancies across the judiciary are more than 40 percent higher today.

So what happened in 2014? Like the past two years, the minority forced the Senate to take a cloture vote on the majority of judicial nominations. Each of them passed, and a confirmation vote followed on the same day nearly 40 percent of the time.

But that tells only part of the story. The Senate took more than one nomination cloture vote on a single day only 14 times in the last two years. The Senate took multiple nomination cloture votes twice as often in 2014 alone.

The final tally for 2014 was 77 confirmations to the U.S. District Court, and another 12 to the U.S. Court of Appeals — the third-highest annual judicial-confirmation total in American history. In fact, the Senate confirmed as many judges in 2014 alone as it has, on average, in each two-year Congress since Richard Nixon was elected president.

So if post-cloture debate time is the problem, and using the nuclear option to reinterpret Rule 22 is the answer, the proof will be that the confirmation river will be raging this year.