Posted on Tuesday, August 26, 2025
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by Shane Harris
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0 Comments
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Democrats have weaponized a 100-year-old Senate tradition known as the “blue slip” to block constitutionalist judges and tough-on-crime prosecutors and prevent President Donald Trump from fulfilling his constitutional duty of filling vacancies in the judicial system. Senate Republicans shouldn’t let well-intentioned but misguided efforts to preserve this outdated practice get in the way of delivering on the mandate Americans handed them last November.
The Senate blue slip dates back to 1917, when the Senate Judiciary Committee first introduced it as a courtesy to home-state senators. The committee would send senators a literal blue piece of paper on which they could indicate approval, disapproval, or neutrality regarding a judicial nominee from their state.
The practice was designed to give senators – who presumably knew their state’s legal community best – special power in the confirmation process over nominees from their home state, while also reinforcing the Senate’s constitutional “advice and consent” role.
The power of the blue slip, however, has never been uniform. Some Judiciary Committee chairs have treated a missing or negative slip as an outright veto, while others have viewed it as only advisory. In modern times, the tradition has been applied most strictly to district court nominees, since their jurisdiction is confined to one state, while appellate court nominees have increasingly moved forward even if blue slips are withheld.
The blue slip is in the news now because Democrats are abusing the practice to block scores of Trump’s nominees.
The most high-profile case is that of Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal attorney, whom he tapped to be a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. That state’s two Democrat senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim, declined to turn in their blue slips on her nomination. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), honoring the blue slip tradition, refused to schedule a hearing for Habba, killing her nomination.
In doing so, Grassley effectively handed Booker and Kim a veto over one of Trump’s nominees, despite the fact that American voters elected Trump to install tough-on-crime figures like Habba in prosecutorial roles.
In response to pressure from the White House to limit or outright abolish the blue slip practice, Grassley pointed out that blue slips also allowed Republicans to block some of Biden’s nominees. “The 100 yr old “blue slip” allows home state senators 2 hv input on US attys & district court judges In Biden admin Republicans kept 30 LIBERALS OFF BENCH THAT PRES TRUMP CAN NOW FILL W CONSERVATIVES,” the 91-year-old senator posted on X.
But Grassley would do well to heed his own advice from eight years ago and not be so gullible as to believe that Democrats are acting in good faith now. “We should not allow home-state senators to abuse this courtesy by attempting to block committee proceedings for political or ideological reasons,” he said back in 2017.
That comment came in response to a Democrat push to allow just a single senator’s unreturned or negative blue slip to block the Judiciary Committee from even holding a hearing on a nominee. At the time, Grassley’s office published a memo which pointed out that “since the blue slip courtesy was created in 1917, only two chairmen (Sens. James Eastland and Patrick Leahy) had strict policies requiring two positive blue slips from home-state senators before the Judiciary Committee would consider a nomination.”
Perhaps even more importantly, given the present context, the memo notes that “in 25 of the 36 years before Senator Grassley became Chairman, chairmen have allowed hearings on nominees despite negative or unreturned blue slips.”
In other words, Grassley himself has acknowledged that the blue slip is not a hard and fast rule, that holding a hearing for Habba wouldn’t be out of step with how prior chairs have treated an unreturned blue slip, and that allowing Democrats to abuse the blue slip courtesy to advance their own partisan agenda is a dangerous precedent to set.
Grassley should also recognize that this is precisely what Democrats are doing now – which is why Trump was able to appoint and confirm 234 federal judges in his first term, while he has confirmed only five in the first seven months of his second term.
Democrats showed last year that there is no length to which they will not go to block Trump’s agenda. The same politicians and pundits whining about “partisan” judges and U.S. Attorneys just spent four years weaponizing the entire American legal system against their top political rival in Donald Trump, from launching FBI raids on his Florida home to dragging him and the entire country through a sham trial in New York City so they could brand him a “convicted felon.” Are we really to believe now that Senate Democrats are truly worried about “decorum” and “institutional norms” when it comes to blue slips?
Grassley and others who defend the blue slip are well-intentioned, and in a better world, their faith in Senate tradition would be admirable. It would be refreshing if senators truly exercised that courtesy with their states’ best interests in mind.
But that is not the world we live in. Time and again, Democrats have proven that they know only one language: power. The days of bipartisan consensus and mutual respect for Senate norms are long gone. Republicans cannot afford to cling to outdated courtesies while Democrats weaponize them to stop a duly elected president from implementing the agenda that the American people elected him to pursue.
Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
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