Trump takes aim at Senate 'blue slip' tradition as GOP resists change
President Donald Trump is waging war against a century-old tradition in the Senate that both Republicans and Democrats don’t want to touch.
Trump has ebbed and flowed in his disdain for the blue slip tradition in the upper chamber, taking out his frustrations on Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and other Republicans who have drawn a firm line in the sand for their support of the practice.
Much of his anger stemmed from the blue slip’s role in derailing a pair of his hand-picked U.S. attorney nominees — Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan — last year.
Trump sounded off on the practice late last year in the Oval Office, arguing that the GOP should "get rid of blue slips, because, as a Republican President, I am unable to put anybody in office having to do with US attorneys or having to do with judges."
But the practice, which has been around since World War I, is likely not going anywhere, given that it’s been a valuable tool for minority parties to block nominees.
The tradition allows for home state senators to weigh in on judicial nominees, giving them a say on who does and doesn’t move forward. Returning a blue slip is the equivalent of giving a thumbs up to the nominees moving forward, while keeping the slip effectively blocks the process.
While the tradition was used to block both Halligan and Habba, both of whom served as Trump’s attorneys while in between stints in the White House, Republicans have still been successful in confirming several of the president’s judicial picks.
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Grassley noted in a post on X that "nearly 1/5 of the 417 nominees who were confirmed this [year] went" through his committee.
"I’m ready to process even more in the new [year] just need materials from WH and DOJ so [committee] can continue contributing to Senate's historic nominations progress," he said.
While Senate Democrats tried to block as many of Trump’s nominees throughout last year, Republicans changed the rules to ram more through. That resulted in the upper chamber confirming 36 U.S. attorneys and 26 federal judges.
Four of those were from Democratic senators with blue slips in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Michigan and Minnesota, where the Trump administration’s usage of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents has faced legal challenges.
Both of Minnesota’s Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, who aren’t quiet critics of Trump and his administration, returned their blue slips for U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen last year.
"Putting aside political differences, he is respected across the board in Minnesota, and so I thought he would be a good U.S. attorney," Smith said.
And notably, the blue slip tradition was used by Republicans to ensure that Trump would have 15 judges to appoint once he took office, blocking several of former President Joe Biden’s nominees in the process. There is also not a single blue slip holding up a judicial nominee currently making its way through the process.
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There have also been several Senate Republicans who have pushed back against Trump’s demand to decimate the tradition, including Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and John Kennedy, R-La., both members of the Judiciary Committee.
They argued that the entire point of the blue slip was to ensure that individual senators got to have a say on the matter, and that the "issue cut both ways."
"I would urge my colleagues to respectfully tell the president that we would do damage to this institution, and we would do damage to the power of individual senators if we were to rescind the blue slip," Tillis said on the Senate floor last year.
Like many instances of Trump’s desire to take a sledgehammer to Senate tradition or procedure, Republicans largely aren’t biting.
And neither are members of Senate GOP leadership, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who last year argued that there was more of an "intense feeling about preserving the blue slip maybe even than there is the filibuster."
Thune noted that he and fellow South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds both took advantage of the blue slip process to ensure that their state had a Republican-appointed district court judge for the first time since former President Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
"There were two vacancies," Thune said. "They wanted one Dem, we gave them a Dem, we got a Republican person into that position in South Dakota. So it’s — there are examples of how that process, I think, works to our advantage, and that’s what most senators hang on to when it comes to a discussion about the blue slip."