President joe biden is expected soon to name his pick to replace Justice Stephen Breyer, the leader of the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc who recently announced his plans to retire. Mr Biden’s pledge to put the first black woman on the court will mark a milestone in its history. (Black women make up less than 2% of people ever to have served in America’s federal judiciary.) A long confirmation period may lie ahead. Since the end of the second world war the average time from nomination by a president to confirmation by the Senate has increased from 13 to 49 days. The process was once much less gruelling.

Take Edward Douglass White. In 1894 the senator from Louisiana was confirmed as an associate justice on the day he was nominated by Grover Cleveland, the president. That was not exceptional. Between 1789 and 1941 six other justices were confirmed by the Senate on the day they were nominated, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank. (Spare a thought, however, for Louis Brandeis, whose confirmation in 1916 took 125 days—the longest in history—when Republicans opposed the elevation of the prominent social-justice lawyer.) Yet, although Amy Coney Barrett, the most recent addition to the court, and John Roberts, the current chief justice, enjoyed speedy hearings, it has taken, on average, 63 days for 21st-century justices to be confirmed.

The main reason it takes so much longer is political, as America has grown more polarised between Democrats and Republicans in recent decades. “It serves both the president’s party and the opposing party well to draw out a high-profile battle over a Supreme Court nominee,” says Seth Masket, director of the Centre on American Politics at the University of Denver. It took Republicans 88 days to elevate Brett Kavanaugh, nominated by Donald Trump in 2018, to the Supreme Court bench, amid a heated contest between Democrats and his Republican supporters.

Presidents now see vacancies as opportunities to extend their grip on power long after they leave office, increasing the wrangling over confirmations. In the 19th century, after the death of Justice Henry Baldwin, Americans waited more than two years until his successor took his place. Yet just eight days after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, Mr Trump nominated Justice Barrett to succeed her. Mr Biden is having to move quickly before the mid-term elections in November, when Democrats are likely to lose control of the Senate. In 2016 Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, stonewalled Barack Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland, for almost nine months before the presidential election won by Mr Trump. In 2022 the timing of Justice Breyer’s resignation should deny Mr McConnell the chance to thwart another Democratic president. ■

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