Donald Trump has lashed out at what he called the Senate’s “old and ridiculous custom” of using the “blue slip” tradition. The procedural tool that allows home-state senators to block nominees for federal judgeships and U.S. attorney posts.
Venting his frustration in a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump claimed that eight of his nominees – whom he described as “highly respected” – are being denied confirmation for posts in “highly consequential states” for the sole reason that they are Republicans.
He argued that the practice has become a partisan weapon, obstructing appointments not on merit but on political identity.
“These GREAT people’s careers have been badly hurt by the Radical Left Democrats, using an old and ridiculous custom strictly to their advantage,” Trump wrote. “What a shame!”
Trump further alleged that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have pressed its chair, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, to continue honoring the blue slip rule.
In August, Trump raged that his constitutional right to appoint judges and U.S. attorneys had been “completely taken away from me” in states that have more than one Democratic senator, and suggested he could take legal action to prove that blue slipping is unconstitutional.
“We’re … going to be filing a lawsuit on blue slipping,” Trump told reporters last month.
“You know, blue slips make it impossible for me as president to appoint a judge or U.S. Attorney because they have a gentlemen’s agreement. It’s nothing memorialized, it’s a gentleman’s agreement that’s about 100 years old.”
What is the blue slip system?
The “blue slip” is a long‑standing Senate tradition that gives home‑state senators a say over federal judicial nominees. When a president puts forward a candidate for a judgeship or U.S. attorney post, the two senators from that nominee’s state each receive a blue slip on which they can register support, opposition, or decline to respond.
While the practice is not a formal rule, the Senate Judiciary Committee has historically treated the return – or withholding – of blue slips as a significant factor in deciding whether a nomination moves forward.
In effect, the system allows individual senators to exercise considerable influence, and sometimes veto power, over appointments in their own states.
However, the rules and weighting given to the process have changed, flip-flopped, and been reinterpreted numerous times since the system emerged in the early 20th century.
This is also true in recent years – in 2017, then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he didn’t believe a Trump pick should be blocked just because a blue slip hadn’t been returned.
At the time, he said the blue slip should be viewed “as simply [a] notification of how you’re going to vote, not as an opportunity to blackball” a nominee.
This was effectively put into practice, as in February 2019, one of Trump’s picks, attorney Eric Miller, was confirmed to serve on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, even though neither of his two home-state senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both Democrats from Washington state, had returned blue slips for him.
He became the first federal judicial nominee to be confirmed in disregard of the blue slip system.
Several other nominees have since been appointed without two positive blue slips by both Trump (17 in total) and Joe Biden, who appointed six nominees despite opposition during his presidency.
However, the rules have changed again, which explains Trump’s current frustration. In the closing months of Biden’s presidency, then Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin proposed reinstating the blue slip on circuit court nominees to restore power to the minority party to block the White House’s judicial nominees.
Senior Republicans and Democrats agreed to return to the system, which had to be decided before the 5 November 2024 presidential election day. This gamble would only pay off for the losing party, in this case, the Democrats, as Trump was returned to power.
