When the Senate Judiciary Committee meets Thursday to vote on another slate of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees, Democrats will be benefiting from more than their two additional years of Senate control.
Democrats – with the expansion of their majority in the midterms to a 51-49 margin – have gained new advantages in their remaking of the federal bench that they didn’t have during the first half of Biden’s administration. Among them, soon having a clear majority on the Judiciary Committee – rather than the previous even split – that will limit the ability of Senate Republicans to slow the pace of confirmations.
But the committee’s Democratic leadership is stopping short of committing to another aggressive move that would hyper-charge Biden’s reshaping of the judiciary.
Activists on the left want Chairman Dick Durbin to abolish the “blue slip,” the last major tool GOP senators have to constrain the impression Biden can make on the courts, but the Illinois Democrat has not been willing to take that step.
Just a few weeks into the new Congress, shadow boxing has already begun over the role of so-called blue slips – the sign-off district court nominees must get from their home state senators – and whether they will be used to obstruct Biden’s judicial overhaul.
“Republicans have made a mockery of the blue slip system,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told CNN. “I’m counting on our leadership, the chairman to impose some discipline and order on this process.”
The first two years that Biden was in the White House, the president broke records on judicial confirmations. He did so, however, by clearing through vacancies that would be the easiest for him to fill, because they largely stemmed from states represented by Democratic senators. Now his push on judges…
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