Top Democrat decries 'slow-mo self-destruction' of Senate Judiciary Committee
Source: Courthouse News Service
April 30, 2026
WASHINGTON (CN) — Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse issued a stark warning to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, urging his colleagues to claw back their power over White House judicial nominees and end what he called a “slow-mo self-destruction” of the influential Senate panel.
The strong statement from the top Senate Democrat — and the apparent favorite to assume the Judiciary Committee gavel if Republicans lose the majority in November — comes as the Trump administration has taken a novel legal approach to its selection of U.S. attorneys that critics have framed as an end run around the Senate’s role of advice and consent.
Speaking from the committee dais Thursday morning as the panel met to vote on a slate of the White House nominees for vacancies on federal district courts and U.S. attorneys’ offices, Whitehouse argued that for years the upper chamber’s judicial affairs committee has slowly ceded its power to the executive branch. “The net result is, as the politics balance out, that we transferred our power on this committee, individual senators’ power on this committee, to the executive branch, and we’ve never gotten it back,” said the Rhode Island Democrat. “We just gave it away.”
That “slow-mo self-destruction” of the Judiciary Committee’s authority, he claimed, began when the panel did away with senators’ ability to reject White House nominees for appellate court vacancies in their home states. Known as the Senate blue slip, the century-old practice was initially designed as a mechanism to give lawmakers a say in the judicial selection process and to avoid the White House foisting unqualified nominees onto Congress. But some critics of blue slips have said they’ve become a tool of obstruction, and in 2017 the Senate’s Republican majority said it would no longer honor them for circuit court nominees.
Read more: https://courthousenews.com/top-democrat-decries-slow-mo-self-destruction-of-senate-judiciary-committee/
SENATE "BLUE SLIP"
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