Three hundred and thirty-six days — 11 months exactly. That’s how long Butler County Court of Common Pleas Judge Marilyn Horan has been waiting to take a seat on the federal bench in Pittsburgh.

President Barack Obama nominated Judge Horan for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania nearly a year ago. She would fill one of three seats on the court which have been vacant since 2013. A fourth seat became vacant this year, according to JudicialNominations.org, which tracks judicial vacancies and nominations.

And it doesn’t appear that any of those seats will be filled with the expediency they deserve.

It took the U.S. Senate nearly five months to hold Horan’s confirmation hearing, which was completed on Dec. 9, 2015, Since then, there’s been no timetable put forward for a full vote by the Senate to send her or any of the dozens of other judicial nominees awaiting confirmation to the federal bench.

That’s a shameful and harmful state of affairs which Pennsylvania voters shouldn’t tolerate. District courts across the country hear hundreds of thousands of cases annually, and need a full complement of judges to function properly. In 2015 there were 427,512 pending cases before the courts, according to an annual report from the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts.

That’s 549 cases per judge, with the vast majority of filings being civil in nature.

Horan, who is by all accounts an excellent jurist with years ofcivil expertise under her belt, is sorely needed by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. So is Judge Susan Paradise Baxter, who would fill a seat in Erie and become the only federal judge serving northwestern Pennsylvania.

That bears repeating: this U.S. Senate is allowing an entire corner of Pennsylvania to go without a sitting federal judge. According to a poll conducted in May by GBA Strategies, a progressive think tank, people aren’t impressed.

Even when it comes to a more political judicial appointment — namely a hearing on Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Merrick Garland — a wide majority of Pennsylvanians, 66 percent, want to see an up-or-down vote in the Senate, the poll found.

Pennsylvanians aren’t happy about the judicial obstruction going on in Washington, and their disgust is justified. As of April there were 50 judicial nominees across the country awaiting a vote, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

Since 2015 the Senate has confirmed just 17 judicial nominees, the fewest since 1960; and 30 jurisdictions now face a “judicial emergency” because of the delays.

In the case of Judge Horan and district court nominees like her, the Senate’s obstructionist tactics aren’t just harmful, they are nonsensical. These appointees aren’t political statements by the president or even generally controversial in any way. Both Horan and Baxter have been endorsed by Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican, and Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat.

Yet the Senate’s destructive behavior, meant to harm Obama but managing only to punish sitting federal judges and the citizens these courts are meant to serve, continues.