The Senate Blue Slip, Explained: The Custom Trump Wants Gone

More than 180 times since 2017, a senator from the party out of power has picked up a piece of pale blue paper, signed it, and sent it back to the Senate Judiciary Committee — not to cast a vote, just to say a home-state judicial nominee is fine with them. That quiet paper trail is called the blue slip, and this summer it is the most contested unwritten rule in Washington.

The custom is older than the interstate highway system. For more than a century, the Senate Judiciary Committee has sent a blue-colored form to the two senators representing a nominee's home state whenever a president picks someone for a federal district judgeship or a U.S. attorney post. If both senators return it with approval, the nomination moves. If a senator withholds it — a "negative" blue slip, or simply silence — the committee chair has traditionally refused to schedule a hearing at all, freezing the pick indefinitely.

President Trump wants that veto gone. Late last year, in the Oval Office, he argued Republicans should get rid of blue slips, because, as a Republican President, I am unable to put anybody in office having to do with U.S. attorneys or having to do with judges. His frustration traces in part to nominations for U.S. attorney posts — including Alina Habba's and Lindsey Halligan's — that stalled under Democratic blue slips last year.

What Is a Blue Slip in the Senate?

Mechanically, it is simple: the Judiciary Committee mails a blue form to both senators from a nominee's home state. Only district court judges and U.S. attorneys trigger it; circuit court nominees have been exempt since 2017, when Chairman Chuck Grassley narrowed the practice to speed up appellate confirmations. Nothing in the Senate's written rules requires a chair to honor a withheld slip. It survives purely because every chair, in both parties, has chosen to respect it.

That restraint is the whole point.

"Under the first Trump and the Biden administrations, senators from the opposing party returned more than 180 blue slips for district court nominees. Those blue slips weren't impediments, but instead useful tools to reach bipartisan agreement."

Sen. Chuck Grassley, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, opening statement, June 10, 2026

Why Is Trump Trying to Kill the Blue Slip Tradition?

Speed. By early February, Senate Republicans had confirmed 33 of Trump's judicial nominees since the start of his second term, already ahead of the 19 Article III judges — including Justice Neil Gorsuch — confirmed in the first year of his first term. Biden's Senate still outpaced that early second-term Trump clip, confirming 42 nominees in its own first year. Trump's first term ended with 234 confirmed judges total, and allies close to him want the second term to beat it.

Not every Republican agrees eliminating the blue slip is the way there. Nuking the blue slip would be a huge mistake, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., told Fox News Digital, arguing the tool protects whichever party is in the minority — and Republicans will be the minority again eventually. Grassley has been just as blunt. Asked in February whether the pace of confirmations proved the blue slip could be scrapped, he said it did not: It doesn't need to be a present question. Because it's a question of 110 years, and everybody in the Senate wants to maintain the blue slip.

Has Any Democrat Returned a Blue Slip This Year?

Two, so far. On June 10, Grassley confirmed that Pennsylvania nominee Antonio Pozos and Michigan nominee Michael Martin became the first judicial picks this Congress to receive blue slips from Democratic senators — John Fetterman, Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin. Grassley called it a rare moment of cooperation and singled out the dark-money group Demand Justice for threatening ad campaigns against Democrats who return slips at all.

New York tells the opposite story. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has gone more than a year without returning a blue slip for any U.S. attorney or district court nominee from his state, and Trump has responded by tying the standoff to an unrelated fight — saying he will not move on a new director of national intelligence or a FISA nominee until he gets his picks confirmed for the Southern District of New York. For the first time on record, Senate Democrats have not let a single civilian nominee through by voice vote or unanimous consent this Congress.

The blue slip is not the only unwritten custom quietly shaping what makes it through the Senate. The Byrd Rule does something similar to what can survive inside a reconciliation bill, and a pocket rescission lets a White House cancel funding Congress already approved without a vote at all. None of them appear in the Constitution. All of them decide who gets confirmed, what gets funded, and what a president can quietly route around — right up until a chairman, or a court, decides otherwise.