Senate Republicans confirmed six of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, building on their plan to quickly approve as many of the president’s judges as possible.
The Senate GOP is working quickly to confirm Trump’s judicial nominees, but the president and some of his allies want to get rid of a tradition that has been in place for more than a hundred years and helps keep the judicial nomination process fair for both parties, Fox News noted.
They say that the blue slip tradition is making it harder for Republicans to confirm their picks and that Democrats are holding the process hostage.
“Nuking the blue slip would be a huge mistake,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., told Fox News Digital.
Tillis, like many other Republicans, has said that the blue slips are a useful tool for the minority party. He also said that when Democrats take back control of the upper chamber, the GOP will have to use the tradition to their advantage.
Since Trump took office for the second time, the Senate has confirmed 33 judges. This is a lot more than the total number of judicial nominees, including U.S. attorneys, district and circuit court judges, that went through the Senate during his first term.
The Senate confirmed 19 Article III nominees during the first year of his first term. One of these was Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Republicans are doing much better than Trump did in his first term, but Democrats under former President Joe Biden still did better in this area. During his first year in office, Biden got 42 judicial nominees confirmed.
It’s not clear if the Senate can beat Trump’s final total of 234 judicial nominees from his first term, but for now, the blue slip seems safe.
Still, Trump sounded off on the practice late last year in the Oval Office, arguing that the GOP 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.”
Trump’s anger with the tradition, which has been around for more than 100 years in the upper chamber, probably came from the fact that blue slips stopped the nominations of Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan last year.
He has been angry with Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who is a strong supporter of the practice, and other Republicans who want to keep it going.
In 2017, Grassley changed the rules so that circuit court judges could skip the process. This made it easier for Republicans to confirm more judges under Trump, even though Democrats didn’t like it.
Grassley told Fox News Digital, “It doesn’t need to be a present question,” when asked if the Senate’s slow pace in confirming judicial nominees showed that the blue slip was here to stay.
“Because it’s a question of 110 years, and everybody in the Senate wants to maintain the blue slip,” Grassley said.
Last week, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Nicholas Ganjei, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, to a lifetime federal judgeship in Houston.
The Senate approved Ganjei’s nomination by a 51–45 vote that fell largely along party lines, with four senators not voting.
Ganjei will step down from the U.S. Attorney’s Office after serving just over one year in the role.
He was appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas on Jan. 30, 2025. Ganjei initially served in an interim capacity and was never confirmed by the Senate.
Instead, he was appointed to the permanent position by the district’s judges in May. Those same judges will now serve alongside him on the federal bench.
Ganjei was nominated for the judgeship in October and advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in December.
President Donald Trump praised Ganjei as a “fearless proponent of immigration enforcement, strong borders, and law and order.”
U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz endorsed Ganjei’s nomination. Ganjei previously served as Cruz’s chief counsel from 2022 to 2025.
He has also worked as a federal prosecutor and briefly served as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas in 2021.
