Trump pushes to end Senate ‘blue slip’ tradition as Republicans resist

President Donald Trump is waging war against a century-old tradition in the Senate that both Republicans and Democrats don’t want to touch.

Trump has fluctuated in his disdain for the blue-brief tradition in the Upper House, expressing frustrations with Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and other Republicans who have drawn a firm line in the sand for their support of the practice.

Much of his anger stemmed from the blue slip’s role in derailing two of his hand-picked U.S. attorneys – Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan – last year.

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President Donald Trump rides Marine One for his departure from the South Lawn of the White House, January 16, 2026, in Washington. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Trump spoke out about the practice late last year in the Oval Office, arguing that the Republican Party should “get rid of the blue slips, because, as a Republican president, I am not in a position to appoint anyone who deals with U.S. attorneys or judges.”

But the practice, which has been around since World War I, is unlikely to go anywhere, given that it serves as a valuable tool for minority parties to block candidates.

The tradition allows home state senators to weigh in on judicial nominees, giving them a say in who moves forward or doesn’t move forward. Returning a blue slip amounts to giving candidates a boost, while keeping the slip effectively blocks the process.

Although this tradition was used to block Halligan and Habba, who were both Trump lawyers between terms in the White House, Republicans still managed to confirm several of the president’s judicial picks.

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Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is seen at the U.S. Capitol during votes related to the government shutdown in Washington, October 16, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

Grassley noted in an article on X that “nearly a fifth of the 417 confirmed applicants [year] went through” his committee.

“I’m ready to deal with even more in the new [year] I just need material from WH and DOJ so [committee] “We can continue to contribute to historic progress in Senate nominations,” he said.

While Senate Democrats tried to block as many of Trump’s nominees as possible throughout last year, Republicans changed the rules to force more votes. This led the Upper House to confirm 36 U.S. attorneys and 26 federal judges.

Four of them came from Democratic senators from Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Michigan and Minnesota, where the Trump administration’s use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents has faced legal challenges.

Minnesota’s two Democratic senators, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, who are not quietly critical of Trump and his administration, turned in their blue slips to U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen last year.

“Political differences aside, he is respected across the board in Minnesota, and so I thought he would be a good U.S. attorney,” Smith said.

And notably, the blue slip tradition was used by Republicans to ensure that Trump would have 15 judges to nominate once he took office, effectively blocking several of former President Joe Biden’s nominees. There is also not a single blue slip holding back a judicial candidate who is currently working his way through the process.

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Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., appears on “Meet the Press” in Washington, Nov. 23, 2025. (Shannon Finney/NBC via Getty Images)

Several Senate Republicans also opposed Trump’s demand to decimate the tradition, including Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and John Kennedy, R-La., both members of the Judiciary Committee.

They argued that the main purpose of the blue slip was to ensure that every senator had a say in the matter and that “the issue went both ways.”

“I urge my colleagues to respectfully tell the president that we would be damaging to this institution and we would be damaging to the power of every senator if we canceled the blue slip,” Tillis said on the Senate floor last year.

As in many cases of Trump’s desire to hammer Senate tradition or procedure, Republicans are not biting.

And neither do members of GOP leadership in the Senate, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who argued last year that there was more of an “intense feeling about preserving the blue slip, maybe even a filibuster.”

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Thune noted that he and fellow South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds both took advantage of the blue slip process to ensure their state has a Republican-appointed district court judge for the first time since former President Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

“There were two vacancies,” Thune said. “They wanted a Democrat, we gave them a Democrat, we appointed a Republican to this position in South Dakota. So there are examples of how this process, I think, works to our advantage, and that’s what most senators latch onto when it comes to a blue slip discussion.”