Bill Lee: “I wish to speak for a few minutes about the Senate blue slip. As my colleagues know, when the President nominates…”

“I wish to speak for a few minutes about the Senate blue slip. As my colleagues know, when the President nominates someone who will be processed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, home State Senators receive a letter informing them of the nomination and asking whether they approve of the nominee in question. The letter is printed on blue paper--thus the name. That is why we call it the blue slip. The question on the table is, What should happen if one or both of the home State Senators do not approve the nomination? In previous years, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has treated the blue slip as a de facto veto, but that is not how the blue slip originally functioned. Between 1917, when the blue slip was first used, and 1955, the blue slip was never treated as a veto. Instead, it gave the home State Senators a special ability to state their objections about a nominee during a hearing. The committee could then decide how to proceed. When James Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi, became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1955, he took a different approach. Why did Eastland implement this new policy? No one knows for sure, but one scholar has written that Eastland, an ardent segregationist, might have been trying in part to ``keep Mississippi's federal judicial bench free of sympathizers with Brown v. Board of Education.'' We are evaluating the strength of a custom.…”