For close to three years, of the seventeen senators that were elected under the NPP in the 2004 General Elections, six remained loyal to McClintock's presidency, thus denying his opponents the unanimity required by Senate Rules II and VI to declare the presidency vacant. As McClintock stripped eight of the ten senators who supported Rosselló's claim for the Presidency of the chairmanships of Senate committees, leaving a total of ten committees under the leadership of the five NPP senators who still backed him and two, the Ethics and the Public Safety committees remained under the leadership of senators supporting Rosselló. Many Capitol insiders had claimed that this had the effect of overflowing committees with work and slowing down the process of bills becoming laws. However, when that issue was raised on the floor of the Senate, McClintock ordered an investigation on legislative productivity that he stated statistically demonstrated that committee output was higher during the third legislative session (after committee and chairmanship consolidations) than during the first.