Campaign Action
Right-wing activist groups have been putting intense pressure on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to start packing the courts with Donald Trump's nominees. The extremist Judicial Crisis Network has $250,000 worth of ads that ready to hit the Washington, D.C., airwaves aimed directly at McConnell to tell him to force the nominees through one way or another. Late Tuesday, they announced that McConnell was caving to them and they'd hold off the ads.
"The campaign, including the advertising, is in a holding pattern for now because Leader McConnell's office has reached out and wants to have discussions about how best to proceed in the coming months in order to avoid the kind of judicial confirmations bottleneck that the groups are concerned about," a spokesperson for the Judicial Crisis Network said late Monday.
The conservative rag Weekly Standard, via Election Law Blog is now quoting McConnell as ready to pull the plug entirely on blue slips, the tradition of allowing home state senators to approve or deny a nominee. That approval is formally provided, according to Senate lore, on a blue piece of paper. It's never been a firm Senate rule, but a norm in the Judiciary Committee that Republicans have recognized opportunistically and Democrats have regularly honored. McConnell has apparently made the decision for Republicans that they're not going to play nice in jamming through Trump's judges. "The majority," he told a Weekly Standard reporter, will treat a blue slip "as simply notification of how you're going to vote, not as an opportunity to blackball." That renders it meaningless.
Now, normally this is not a decision that is made by the majority leader. Committee procedure is decided by the committee chairs, in this case Chuck Grassley (R-IA). Grassley's been leaning for weeks toward jettisoning the practice, so it's pretty likely he'll just go along with whatever McConnell wants him to do.
This is an escalation by Republicans. Throughout the Obama administration they refused to provide their consent on nominees and while Democrats were in the majority, they honored those holds. They played fair because they're the good guys. We're long past time where following the rules makes you the good guys. There's an illegitimate president elected thanks to interference by a foreign power who is now in a position to remake the judiciary in him image. Democrats have the moral obligation to do everything in their power to resist his agenda by whatever means possible.
If that means shutting the Judiciary Committee down, so be it.