Senate Democrats also began to stray from the norm of forbearance in the area of advice and consent, obstructing an unprecedented number of President Bush’s judicial nominees, either by rejecting them outright or by allowing them to languish by not holding hearings. The norm of deference to the president on appointments was dissolving. Indeed, the New York Times quoted one Democratic strategist as saying that the Senate needed to “change the ground rules…there [is] no obligation to confirm someone just because they are scholarly or erudite.”
