How Blue Slips and Home-State Senators Shape the Federal Bench

Somewhere in the Senate Judiciary Committee's offices there is a supply of blue paper. When a president nominates someone to be a federal judge or a U.S. attorney in a particular state, the committee chair sends a form printed on that paper to the two senators from the nominee's home state. Each senator can sign it and send it back, which signals consent. Or a senator can do nothing at all, letting the slip sit in a drawer. Nothing in the Constitution mentions this form, and nothing in the Senate's written rules requires the chair to honor it. For most of the last century it has nonetheless decided whether people get lifetime seats on the federal bench. A sheet of colored paper, with no legal force, has outlasted presidents, majority leaders and the filibuster itself.

In short: The blue slip is a Senate Judiciary Committee custom that gives each home-state senator a say over judicial and U.S. attorney nominees from their state. Its force depends entirely on the committee chair, and in 2017 Chairman Chuck Grassley stopped letting a missing slip block appeals court nominees while keeping it for district courts. With Democrats taking the Senate in January 2027, how the next chair handles blue slips will shape which judges a Republican president can seat.

A custom made of paper and habit

The Constitution says the president nominates judges "by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate." It does not say how the Senate should give that advice. Over time the Senate developed a deep habit of deferring to the senators who know a state best, a practice older than the blue slip and sometimes called senatorial courtesy. If a senator objected to a nominee from home, colleagues tended to go along.

The blue slip turned that habit into a form. The Congressional Research Service, which has written the most careful histories of the practice, traces its use to about 1917. For decades, though, it was not clear what an unreturned slip actually did. That depended on the person holding the gavel.

The chair who made it a hard veto was James Eastland of Mississippi, who ran the Judiciary Committee from 1956 to 1978. Under Eastland, if a home-state senator did not return the slip, the nominee did not get a hearing. Full stop. It is worth sitting with who held that power and why. Eastland was one of the Senate's most committed segregationists, and a home-state veto over federal judges in the South was, in that era, a way to keep judges who might enforce civil rights law off the benches that mattered most for enforcing it. The tool that progressives later came to value as a check on presidents began life partly as a shield for Jim Crow.

The rule changes with every chair

When Ted Kennedy took over the committee in 1979, he announced that a missing blue slip would no longer automatically kill a nomination; the committee would weigh it. Later chairs moved back and forth. Under some, one negative slip was enough to stop a nominee. Under others, it took both senators, or the objection had to come with a reason, or the White House had to show it had consulted the senators in good faith before sending a name.

Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who chaired the committee for most of the years between 2001 and 2015, honored blue slips strictly for both district and appeals court nominees, including during Barack Obama's presidency. That meant Republican senators could, and did, keep seats open in their states by never returning the paper. Some of the longest-running vacancies of the Obama years were in states with two Republican senators. Leahy kept the practice anyway, arguing that the protection would matter just as much to Democrats under a future Republican president.

That argument was about to be tested.

What Chuck Grassley changed in 2017

Chuck Grassley of Iowa became chair in 2015. During Obama's final two years he kept the blue slip in full force. When Donald Trump took office in 2017 and began nominating judges at a fast pace, Democratic senators in several states declined to return slips for appeals court nominees.

In November 2017, Grassley announced that he would no longer treat a missing blue slip as a veto for nominees to the federal courts of appeals. His reasoning was that circuit courts cover several states, so a single state's senators should not have a veto over a regional court, and that the custom had historically been more about consultation than control. He said the slips would still carry weight, and that he would proceed if the White House had genuinely consulted the home-state senators. For district court nominees, whose courts sit entirely inside one state, he kept the blue slip as a binding check.

The first test came quickly. David Stras, a Minnesota Supreme Court justice nominated to the Eighth Circuit, did not have a returned slip from Senator Al Franken. Grassley moved him through anyway, and the Senate confirmed him in early 2018. Other circuit nominees followed over home-state objections, including in Wisconsin, where Senator Tammy Baldwin had not returned her slip for a nominee to the Seventh Circuit.

When Lindsey Graham took over the committee in 2019, he kept Grassley's approach. And when Democrats regained the gavel in 2021, Chairman Dick Durbin did not restore the old appeals court veto. He kept the blue slip for district courts and U.S. attorneys, and appeals court nominees moved without it. Republican senators in several states then used their district court slips to influence or block nominees from President Biden, which is the same thing Democratic senators had done under Trump.

The case for the blue slip, and the case against it

There are good arguments on both sides here, and readers should hear them straight before hearing ours.

The case for keeping it is mostly about local knowledge and moderation. Home-state senators know the bar, the courts and the reputations in their state. A requirement that the White House win them over pushes presidents toward nominees who are acceptable to both parties in a state with split representation. It is one of the few remaining points in the confirmation process where a minority-party senator has real leverage, and it tends to produce district judges who are less ideological than appeals court picks. Some of the most respected federal trial judges in the country came out of bipartisan deals brokered through blue slips.

The case against it is about accountability and about who gets to say no. A veto that requires no public vote, no stated reason and no deadline is exactly the kind of quiet power that democratic institutions should be wary of. It let segregationists block judges. It has let senators of both parties keep seats empty for years in the hope that a president of their own party will fill them later, while caseloads pile up and people wait longer for their day in court. And because it depends on the chair's will, it is applied when convenient and abandoned when not.

Here is our view. The blue slip, as practiced since 2017, is a lopsided arrangement: it protects district court seats but not the appeals courts, where the law that binds whole regions of the country is actually made. That makes it a weaker check than either its defenders or its critics usually admit. Progressives should not try to resurrect it as a full veto only when a Republican is in the White House, because a rule that flips with the party in power is not a rule. The honest goal is a version both parties can live with in either position.

What the new Senate inherits

Democrats won the Senate on November 3, 2026, and the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027. Who will chair the Judiciary Committee is for the new majority to decide, and we will not guess. Whoever holds the gavel will face a choice that every chair since Eastland has faced: how much weight to give a missing piece of blue paper.

A few things are already clear from the public record. In 2025, with Grassley chairing the committee again, President Trump publicly pressed him to scrap the blue slip for district judges and U.S. attorneys, after the custom stood in the way of some of the administration's picks. Grassley declined and kept the practice. That episode matters because it shows the blue slip now has defenders in both parties who are prepared to keep it even under pressure from their own side.

For a Democratic chair, the district court blue slip would give each home-state senator, Democrat or Republican, a say over the president's trial court nominees in their states. It would not, under current practice, give them any special hold over appeals court nominees. Any attempt to restore an appeals court veto would almost certainly be described, fairly, as a rule change made to suit the new majority. On the other hand, the committee's broader powers over scheduling hearings and votes are not a custom at all. They belong to the chair.

It also helps to remember what has already changed underneath the blue slip. In 2013 the Senate, then under Democratic leadership, ended the filibuster for lower court nominees, so that they could be confirmed by a simple majority. In 2017, under Republican leadership, the Senate did the same for Supreme Court nominees. The blue slip survived both of those changes, which says something about how much senators of every stripe value a power that is personal to them.

How a slip becomes a deal

In practice, the blue slip rarely works as a flat veto. It works as leverage, and the most interesting part of the process happens long before any form is sent.

In states with one senator from each party, or with two senators from the party out of power, the White House counsel's office and the senators' staffs often negotiate over names. Some senators set up merit selection commissions made up of lawyers and community members who interview candidates and send a short list to the senator. The senator then recommends names to the White House. A president who wants a nominee confirmed quickly has every reason to choose from that list, or to trade: a pick the senators like for one seat in exchange for a pick the White House likes for another.

These arrangements are informal, and they vary from state to state and from administration to administration. They have produced some of the more balanced benches in the country, in states where the two senators have long-standing working relationships. They have also produced years of stalemate in states where the senators and the White House simply refuse to deal.

For voters, the lesson is that the blue slip is less about one dramatic refusal than about an ongoing negotiation that rarely makes the news. Asking your senators whether they use a selection commission, and who sits on it, is a good way to learn how judges in your state are really chosen.

Why a trial judge in your state matters more than you think

National attention fixes on the Supreme Court, which decides fewer than a hundred cases with full opinions in a typical term. District courts handle hundreds of thousands of filings a year. That is where a fired worker's discrimination suit is heard, where a challenge to a state voting law first lands, where an immigrant's habeas petition is decided, and where a federal drug sentence is handed down. Most cases never get past that level.

A district judge in a rural part of a state may be the only federal judge within hours of a farmer contesting a federal benefits decision or a tribal member bringing a land claim. The people who appear before those judges rarely know their names. They should. And the senators who signed or withheld the blue slip for those judges are people voters can actually reach, which is more than can be said for most of the machinery of judicial selection.

It is also where the ideal of a judge as a neutral referee meets real life. A trial judge decides which evidence a jury hears, how long a case takes, whether a settlement is fair to a class of workers, and how harsh a sentence will be within the range the law allows. Two judges applying the same law can reach very different results in practice, and the people in front of them feel the difference. That is why the quiet process of choosing those judges deserves more public attention than it gets.

What you can do

• Call your senators and ask a specific question: do you return blue slips for nominees from our state, and on what basis? You can find their phone numbers and latest votes on the representatives page.
• Watch nominations as they move. The Court Watch page tracks Senate votes on judges along with the Supreme Court's opinions and emergency docket.
• Check how the full chamber votes on nominees, and on everything else, on the Congress votes and bills page.
• Keep up with reporting on the bench at the courts topic page, where coverage of nominations, vacancies and rulings is gathered in one place.
• If a federal trial court near you has a long-running vacancy, find out why. Local bar associations often know, and local reporters are usually glad to hear from readers who care.

The blue slip will probably survive the change of majority, as it has survived every other one. The useful question is not whether a senator holds this quiet power, but whether voters know when and how it is being used.