Members of the House Congressional Black Caucus met face-to-face with Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin last week to give him this message: The archaic blue slip tradition he’s following is harming Black people. Senate Republicans are blocking district court nominations in their states, and the vacancies on those courts means justice is delayed.
“I don’t know why anyone, let alone Senate Democrats, would hold up a Jim Crow practice,” Black Caucus Chair Rep. Steven Horsford of Nevada told Politico in an interview this week about the meeting he and the CBC had last week. “It is literally about the fundamental survival of the people we represent,” Horsford added. That’s not hyperbole. Many of the CBC members represent blue districts, often with Black majorities, in red states. They and their constituents are being ignored and thwarted by their Republican senators.
Blue slips are an old Senate practice that the minority uses to block the Senate action. The practice isn’t even a rule; it’s a courtesy the majority extends to the minority. Home state senators recommend judge nominees to the president and then approve them—turning in their approval on a blue piece of paper—or veto those nominations by withholding the blue slip. Durbin is honoring them for district court judges, but he chose not to for appeals court nominees.
A coalition of progressive groups joined the CBC in approaching Durbin about the issue. They wrote to him this week, detailing the problem: “41 of the 45 district court vacancies subject to Republican blue slips—91%—still do not have nominees.” They wrote that Durbin’s decision to continue to honor blue slips “is contributing to this obstruction by giving home state senators more power than they have had through much of modern history, and if unchanged, it will prevent President Biden from filling dozens of judicial vacancies.”
The message from Hosford and his colleagues—Reps. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, Terri Sewell of Alabama, Joe Neguse of Colorado, Troy Carter of Louisiana, Robin Kelly of Illinois, and Al Green from Texas—was that Durbin has the power to fix this. They want Durbin to recognize that “it’s hard for them as the sole Democrat in some of their southern states to defend a policy where one or two Senate Republicans can hold up those nominees.”
The advocacy groups, representing a swath of interests from civil rights to the environment, reinforced the message. They urge Durbin to adopt reforms: Follow the practice of President Joe Biden when he was in charge of the committee and move forward with a nominee as long the president has consulted with the senators, even if a senator doesn’t return the blue slip; give senators a hard deadline for saying yes or no to a nominee, as the committee did for decades; make senators provide public explanations when they deny a blue slip; and make the status of blue slips public.
They didn’t tell Politico what Durbin told them, but if he was as condescending in that private meeting as he was in talking to Politico, it didn’t go well. “I tried to explain to them the arcane Senate rules. And how difficult it would be to do business. So I don’t know if I convinced them, because a lot of them are frustrated with the lack of cooperation,” Durbin said.
Those House lawmakers know the “arcane Senate rules” as well as anyone. They know how difficult it is to “do business” with these Republicans because they have to deal with them all the time on issues in their states. They are frustrated for very good reasons.
Durbin keeps making excuses for not acting that look more foolish and short-sighted with every day that he doesn’t act on nominees. He argues that it will only make Republicans less cooperative if he tries to make them do the damned job the committee is supposed to be doing. As if that were even possible.
Dimitri of WarTranslated has been doing the essential work of translating hours of Russian and Ukrainian video and audio during the invasion of Ukraine. He joins Markos and Kerry from London to talk about how he began this work by sifting through various sources. He is one of the only people translating information for English-speaking audiences. Dimitri’s followed the war since the beginning and has watched the evolution of the language and dispatches as the war has progressed.