The U.S. finally has an ambassador to Germany, after Amy Gutmann was confirmed by the Senate in a 54-to-42 vote Tuesday. President Biden had nominated Gutmann last July. The holdup was in the Foreign Relations Committee, which didn’t hold a hearing until December and then voted her out favorably Jan. 12. Floor action followed just under a month later.

It’s obviously dysfunctional for the U.S. to go without an ambassador to a major world power and ally for more than a year, and for the Senate to take seven months to complete its work for such a position, especially during a major European crisis. But it’s even worse than it looks. President Donald Trump never tried to fill a vacancy that had existed, in effect, since February 2020. So there’s lots of fault to go around: Trump, as he often did, neglected the nuts and bolts of government; Biden took his time choosing an ambassador; the Senate committee moved slowly.

At least floor action was relatively quick. But that, too, is misleading. Republicans continue to filibuster pretty much every judicial and executive branch nomination. Democrats can overcome individual filibusters with a simple majority vote, but by forcing the Senate to spend maximum time with every nomination, Republicans are forcing them to choose which selections to prioritize, meaning that the relatively low-priority picks – for positions still important enough to merit Senate confirmation – are languishing. Gutmann was one of four nominees confirmed Tuesday, but that’s out of almost 200 awaiting action for one of the top 800 confirmable positions tracked by the Partnership for Public Service. Of those, about 70 have been approved by the relevant committees and are only awaiting a final vote. They’re being filibustered, in different form but with the exact same effect as if Republican senators were giving long speeches, Jimmy Stewart style. So choosing the Gutmann nomination for a vote Tuesday meant delaying another pick.

And again: This simply did not happen until recently. For one thing, there was long an agreement that presidents were entitled to the picks they wanted for such positions. Some nominees would run into trouble anyway, and individual senators or small groups might put a “hold” on a confirmation to negotiate for something. But wholesale filibustering just didn’t happen. It’s easy to see the difference. The Senate executive calendar for the second Tuesday in February 2002 – George W. Bush’s second year in office – had all of 10 executive branch nominations and a handful of judicial picks on it, running for just over two pages. The executive calendar for this Tuesday had 24 pages of nominations waiting for a vote.

All of this is senseless. Republicans aren’t going to win a single extra vote in 2022 or 2024 because (to pick one random example) the chief financial officer of the Department of Transportation had to wait a few extra months to be confirmed. Nor will such a delay prevent policies that Republicans dislike from being implemented. In fact, the contrary is true: If Republicans were using selective holds to bargain over specific policy questions, they would have significant leverage. But when every nominee is filibustered, Democrats can simply pick and choose which ones to confirm since there’s no possibility of negotiating to drop the obstacles.

This tactic simply makes the government less efficient and effective. To return to Gutmann, Republicans haven’t gained anything by dragging their feet on a key ambassadorial position, and Democrats haven’t lost anything. But the Senate has lost something, bit by bit, little by little. And so has the nation as a whole.