On Monday, popular vote loser Donald Trump nominated 10 conservative judges to the federal courts, a move that Roll Call reported as "McConnell Gambit on Federal Judges" finally "paying off." But not so fast. Because the Tuesday Night Massacre could and should bring a grinding halt to this, of all things. This is the last president who should have the power to change the face of the federal judiciary. Luckily, as of now, Democrats still have some power: the blue slip.
Two of the 10 judicial nominees the White House unveiled on Monday were on Trump’s short list of potential Supreme Court justices during the campaign: Michigan Supreme Court Justice Joan Larsen, who will be nominated to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and Justice David Stras, who sits on the Minnesota Supreme Court and is Trump’s pick for the 8th Circuit.
Minnesota and Michigan are each represented by two Democratic senators. That gives Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, who hail from Minnesota, and Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters of Michigan, what amounts to veto authority over the nominees, who are already drawing objections from other Democrats.
“We know that there is a prized list now from [conservative] special interest groups and one of them is now on the Supreme Court,” Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Senate Democrat, said Monday, referring to recently-confirmed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. “If that’s the way the president is going to choose the leaders of the judiciary, we need to ask some probing questions about why these special interest groups believe these particular judges are the best choices.”
Of the blue-slip powers, Durbin added: “As long as we have the authority, we’ll use it if necessary.”
Those who've been following years of Senate obstruction of President Barack Obama remember those blue slips.
The custom in the Senate Judiciary Committee is for the chairman to hold off on bringing up nominees until their home-state senators sign off with so-called blue slips. Of course, the other tradition which Trump completely ignored in these cases is to get the names of his nominees through a negotiation process with those same senators. That's not what happened. Sen. Al Franken, for one, has a problem with that, saying the Stras nomination is "the product of a process that relied heavily on guidance from far-right Washington, D.C.-based special interest groups—rather than through a committee made up of a cross section of Minnesota’s legal community." Franken was "not meaningfully" consulted on the nomination, a spokesperson added.
As of now, committee Chairman Chuck Grassley says he will abide by the tradition of the blue slip and he's backed up—so far—by "more than a half-dozen other Republicans on the judiciary panel." Like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who said "I’m not about to give up my rights as a senator to have a say about district court judges who’ll represent my constituents long after the president’s gone."
Democrats absolutely have to take advantage of that, and block any judicial nominee from going to committee until we've got an independent Russia investigation in place. If Grassley reverses course and decides to ignore the blue slip tradition, they need to do everything else they can to stop those nominees, even if it includes boycotting committee meetings and denying a quorum.
We've already got a reactionary Republican operative on the Supreme Court thanks to a Republican Senate that has decided to be Trump's rubber stamp. We can't let the rest of the federal judiciary be wrecked for generations to come.