Based on an analysis of transcripts, the sheer number of comments uttered by senators and the nominee during hearings has quickly grown by an order of magnitude, from a few hundred at most to a thousand at least. (That extra long bar was the Bork hearing, of course, which cracked 3,500 comments.)

And the expansion didn’t come just in the number of comments but also in their breadth. The number of unique issues addressed at the hearings — coded in this data, for example, as “civil rights,” “judicial philosophy,” “environment” and “defense” — has been steadily rising, from two or three to more than a dozen.