Trump eyes suing Senate over blue slips as he fumes about judicial blockade

WASHINGTON (CN) — President Donald Trump on Monday said he was considering filing a lawsuit over the Senate’s longstanding blue slip tradition, as he excoriates top Senate Republicans for refusing to abandon the informal practice often viewed as a last vestige of bipartisanship.

The president has for weeks complained about blue slips, a tradition allowing senators to effectively block certain judicial nominees in their home states, and demanded that GOP lawmakers stop honoring the practice for Democrats.

But the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Republican has so far defended blue slips — and now Trump has threatened to take matters into his own hands.

“You just need one Democrat senator … the only person I can get approved are Democrats or maybe weak Republicans,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon.

Under the blue slip tradition, which both Democrats and Republicans have honored for more than a century, senators can object to the president’s judicial nominees whose jurisdiction would include their home states. The practice was initially designed to shield lawmakers from poorly qualified nominees, but critics on both the left and right have complained that it’s become a tool of partisan obstruction.

Trump has called blue slips a “scam” and a “hoax,” and said Monday that he might mount a legal challenge to the practice.

“This is based on an old custom, it’s not based on a law, and I think it’s unconstitutional and I’ll probably be filing a suit on that pretty soon,” he said.

It’s unclear whether a court could rule on the legality of the blue slip process — as an informal Senate tradition, it’s not written into the chamber’s official rules or codified in any law.

But that fact may not stop the White House from suing to end the practice, said Carl Tobias, chair of the University of Richmond School of Law, who noted that the Trump administration last month filed a lawsuit against an entire bench of federal judges in Maryland over court orders halting deportations.

“He could try to sue the Senate, but I doubt any federal judge would take it very seriously,” said Tobias. “I hope he does sue, because it will show how absurd this dispute is.”

Trump’s threats to take legal action against blue slips come as Republican leaders have resisted mounting pressure from the administration to do away with them.

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has long defended blue slips and has tried to convince the president that the tradition has helped, not hurt, his agenda. In a series of posts on X Monday morning, Grassley pointed out that the blue slip process kept as many as 30 of former President Joe Biden’s nominees off the federal bench, leaving vacancies that Trump can now fill.

“As chairman I set Pres Trump noms up for SUCCESSS NOT FAILURE,” the Iowa Republican wrote.

A spokesperson for Grassley’s office did not immediately return a request for comment. But the senator has pushed back on Trump for weeks over the blue slip tradition.

After the president in July first called on Republicans to abandon blue slips and referred to some Democratic senators as “sleazebags,” Grassley said during a Judiciary Committee meeting that he was “offended” by Trump’s comments and reiterated his commitment to honoring the practice.

A spokesperson for Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, slammed Trump for floating a “baseless” suit.

“When Donald Trump doesn’t get what he wants, his knee-jerk response is to file a baseless lawsuit,” the spokesperson said. “The president needs to read the Constitution, which gives the Senate responsibility for providing advice and consent on nominations.”

In addition to handing the upper chamber advice and consent authority, which presumably would include the “advice” provided using blue slips, the Constitution also gives both houses of Congress power to determine their own rules of proceedings.

Though both Democrats and Republicans have abided by the blue slip in recent years, the scope of the tradition has shifted amid deepening partisanship in the Senate. In 2017, during the first Trump administration, Grassley himself announced that Republicans would no longer honor blue slips for appellate nominees. The senator reasoned at the time that a single lawmakers should not be able to effectively veto circuit court judges whose jurisdiction covers multiple states.

When Democrats took control of the Senate, they continued that precedent but continued to honor Republican blue slips for federal district judges, U.S. marshals and U.S. attorneys.

Still, Trump has claimed without evidence that Democrats during the Biden administration shirked the blue slip tradition, framing it as justification for Republicans walking away from the practice.

“[T]he Democrats, including Crooked Joe Biden (Twice!), have done so on numerous occasions,” the president wrote Sunday night in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social. “Chuck Grassley should allow strong Republican candidates to ascend to these very vital and powerful roles, and tell the Democrats, as they often tell us, to go to HELL!”

Asked for comment on which occasions Trump believed that Democrats abandoned blue slips under the Biden administration, a White House spokesperson deferred to the president’s Oval Office comments.

The president’s ire at blue slips emerged once again last week after a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that Alina Habba, his former lawyer serving as acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, was in her role illegally. Habba, who was initially nominated to the full-time position, faced a blue slip blockade from the Garden State’s Democratic senators.

In an attempt to sidestep Congress, the White House undertook a creative legal gambit which saw officials withdraw Habba’s Senate nomination and fire her court-appointed replacement in the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, then line Habba up as the de facto federal prosecutor for the state. A court last week found that the move violated federal law governing presidential appointments.

And Grassley on Monday pointed out that because the Trump administration had pulled Habba’s nomination, the Senate never got the paperwork it needed to vet her appointment.

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