# Blue Slip The **blue slip** is a century-old courtesy of the [[Senate Judiciary Committee]]: before a nominee to a home-state post gets a hearing, the committee sends each of that state's two senators a blue form. Return it, and the nomination proceeds; withhold it, and — if the chair honors the practice — the nomination simply never gets scheduled. It is not a rule, not a statute, and not enforceable. It is entirely a policy of whoever chairs the committee, which is why its scope has narrowed every time it became inconvenient. Current state (2026): **circuit-court blue slips are dead**, abandoned in 2017 so that home-state objections to appellate nominees are noted and ignored. **District judges, U.S. attorneys, and U.S. marshals still have them** — chair [[Chuck Grassley]] has continued to honor the practice despite a public 2025 pressure campaign from Trump, who called it unconstitutional after blue-slip objections stalled and sank U.S.-attorney picks in blue states. That makes the blue slip the single most effective tool the Senate minority has left in the [[Confirmation Pipeline]] — a piece of paper that one senator can decline to return. ## How it got here The practice dates to 1917 and has always been whatever the chair said it was. Under Democratic chairs from the 1950s it was an absolute veto — the mechanism by which Southern senators kept integrationist judges off their benches — and under Republican chairs it has been trimmed each time it blocked a Republican President: Orrin Hatch narrowed it for Clinton's nominees in the 1990s, restored it against Bush's critics, and in 2017 Grassley ended it for circuit judges so that Trump's appellate nominees could not be stopped by home-state Democrats. Dick Durbin kept the district-court blue slip through Biden's term — costing Democrats seats in Republican states — and Grassley has kept it through Trump's second, refusing in 2025 to abandon it under direct presidential pressure after blue-slip objections stalled U.S.-attorney nominations in New York and New Jersey and forced the Department into the acting-appointment workarounds that the [[Lindsey Halligan]] episode exposed. The practice therefore survives on the word of one 92-year-old senator; the day a chair declines to honor it, it ceases to exist. ## See also - [[How a Nominee Becomes a Federal Judge]] — the blue slip in position as Stage 5 of the Article III track, with the 2025–26 record of what it has and has not stopped - [[Confirmation Pipeline]] — the committee-stage gate where the blue slip sits - [[Senate Judiciary Committee]] · [[Chuck Grassley]] · [[Federal Judiciary Tree]]