If there is one judge who might understand Merrick Garland’s disappointment, at the expiration of his U.S. Supreme Court nomination on Tuesday, it is perhaps one of his colleagues on the federal appeals bench in Washington: Senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg.

The March 16 nomination of Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, languished in the U.S. Senate for 293 days—the longest period of inaction on a Supreme Court nomination in Senate history.