President Trump is off to a good start in making key appointments.

To date, the Senate has confirmed 21 nominees to positions including the secretaries of twelve cabinet departments; attorney general; directors of national intelligence, OMB, and the FBI; trade representative; and heads of agencies such as the EPA, FEMA, and the Small Business Administration. This total compares, at the same point, to 16 under President Joe Biden, and 18 in the first terms of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

The total, however, is only part of the picture. The other part is achieving this result despite unprecedented resistance.

The Senate, for example, must end debate on a nomination before it can vote on confirmation. Since 1949, Senate Rule 22 has required a supermajority to invoke cloture, or end debate, on any pending “matter,” which can include nominations, and that supermajority has been 60 votes since 1975.

From 1949 through November 21, 2013, the Senate took 66 cloture votes on all executive branch nominations; 18 of those votes failed, but only four of those nominees were never confirmed. On that date in 2013, while they controlled the Senate, Democrats used a parliamentary maneuver to change the interpretation of Rule 22 to require only a simple majority to invoke cloture on nominations.

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Changing the interpretation, but not the text, of the cloture rule means that the cloture process remains. A single senator can still object to ending debate the easy way—by unanimous consent without a recorded vote—which forces the majority to file a motion to invoke cloture (that is, end debate) and, at least two days later, the full Senate voting to do so.

Since the cloture rule can no longer be used to defeat a majority-supported nomination by blocking a final confirmation vote, it is today simply a tool of delay and obstruction, a way to make the process more time-consuming and cumbersome.

Only 13 percent of the total number of cloture votes ever cast on executive branch nominations occurred before November 21, 2013, when cloture was actually a meaningful step in the confirmation process. This means that 87 percent of cloture votes on executive branch nominations have been used for no purpose other than to complicate and delay the process.

Which brings us back to the confirmation process for Trump’s second-term nominations. Democrats forced a cloture vote on 19 of the 21 executive branch nominations confirmed so far, compared to eight in 2021, and zero in either 2009 or 2001. In 2001, the Senate even confirmed seven of President George W. Bush’s executive branch nominations on the same day he made them.

That was then, this is Trump. Senate Republicans are demonstrating their confirmation commitment by giving Trump a higher confirmation total, in the face of unprecedented resistance, than previous presidents.

The same situation exists on the judicial side of the confirmation ledger. From 1949 through that fateful day in November 2013, the Senate took 61 cloture votes on judicial nominations; 27 of those votes (some nominees had multiple cloture votes), and eight nominees were never confirmed. Eighty-nine percent of all cloture votes ever taken on judicial nominations, however, have occurred since then. This includes 80 percent of Trump’s first-term judicial nominations and 93 percent of Biden’s. Making nearly every judicial nominee jump through the cloture hoop before being confirmed appears to be the new normal for the confirmation process.

The Heritage Foundation’s Judicial Appointments Tracker shows that 43 positions on life-tenured federal courts are vacant today, less than half of the 108 vacancies when Trump took office in 2017. Since 1980, an average of 22 judges have taken “senior status” during the first six months of new presidencies. They remain federal judges, typically with a reduced caseload, but their active seat opens for a new appointment.

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In his first term, not counting the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, Trump first starting making lower court nominations on March 21, 2017, when he tapped then-U.S. District Judge Amul Thapar for the Sixth Circuit. That was earlier than previous new presidents who started from scratch after succeeding a president of the other party.

In general, Democrat and Republican presidents tend to appoint different kinds of judges. During his first term, for example, Trump appointed 54 judges to the U.S. Court of Appeals who are committed to interpreting the Constitution and statutes according to their original public meaning. Their judicial philosophy, or understanding of their authority and role in our system of government, is more consistent with the Founders’ design than, for example, Biden’s appointees.

Look for Trump to use the same criteria for his judicial nominations as he did in his first term. Presidents from Reagan to Biden have appointed an average of 47 judges per year. If Trump sticks to that average, he will have a two-term appointment total of 422, or 49 percent of the entire federal judiciary.

President Ronald Reagan appointed 54 percent of the judiciary during his two terms, but he was aided by Congress creating 91 new judgeships to fill. And only six of his 377 judicial nominees received even a single vote against confirmation. Similarly, while President Dwight Eisenhower appointed 56 percent of the judiciary, he too benefitted from Congress creating new judgeships and, like Reagan, fewer than two percent of his judicial nominees had any opposition.

But if Trump exceeds the historical average for total appointees during his second term, as he did in his first, he may well appoint a majority of all active federal judges by filling existing vacancies as they occur. Add the unprecedented level of opposition, including cloture votes and a near-record average number of votes against confirmation, and we will see a very significant, and hard-won, impact on the judiciary.