Daily Archives: 2 May 2025

Blue Slips

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Blue slips are a Senate piece of paper the withholding of which enables a single Senator to block a nominee from the Senator’s State or for a position in the Senator’s State from Senate consideration for confirmation. The blue slip process is not binding on anything; it has only the force of Senate custom.

Senate Minority Leader and Progressive-Democrat Chuck Schumer (NY) has withheld his blue slips for two nominees for US Attorneys for New York’s Southern and Eastern Districts of New York. Chuck Grassley (R, IA), Judiciary Committee Chairman, says he’ll honor Schumer’s blue slips.

Why?

On what basis should a single Senator preempt and wholly block from exercise the will and judgment of 22 Senators on the Judiciary Committee? Why should a single Senator be allowed to preempt and wholly block from exercise the will and judgment of 99 other Senators in the Senate as a whole?

Because the Senator whose State the nominee is from knows that nominee best? Because the Senator for whose State position a nominee is proposed knows his State best?

Maybe that close personal knowledge springloads the particular Senator to a biased position against that nominee, whereas the Senators of a committee or the other 99 Senators as a whole are better disposed to an objective, or a more balanced political, assessment of the nominee.

It’s long past time to get rid of this archaic blue slip tool of obstruction, one abused by both parties with equal abandon.

More than that

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President Donald Trump (R) fired Progressive-Democrat EEOC commissioner Jocelyn Samuels over her refusal to follow Trump’s instructions and EOs, among other things, rescinding the Biden administration’s EEOC rules requiring employers to pay for, or to pay insurance coverage for, employee hormone and surgical treatments to resemble the opposite sex, in violation of their [employers’] religious beliefs.

Naturally, Samuels is suing over the effrontery of firing her. Her lawyers are making this argument in court:

Because the Commissioners perform predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative functions, these restrictions on the president’s removal authority are constitutional[.]

On the contrary. Because Commissioners perform predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative functions from inside the Executive Branch, they’re violating bedrock Constitutional separation of powers requirements. Those requirements are articulated in so many words in our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, which mandates legislative functions can occur only within the Legislative Branch, and again in so many words by our Constitution’s Article III, Section 1, which mandates that judicial functions can occur only within the Judicial Branch.

It really is that straightforward. Those broad authorities claimed by the EEOC are themselves wholly unconstitutional.