Andy, your correspondent has it exactly right. As traditionally used, senators from the state in which a given appellate judge would sit could block a nomination by returning a negative blue slip or refusing to return a blue slip at all. This is how both Republican and Democratic senators blocked various nominees to the Fourth Circuit who would have sat in North Carolina and nominees to the Sixth Circuit who would have sat in Michigan. It worked because the seats each Circuit are traditionally divided among the states within the Circuit. In the Sixth Circuit, for example, there are four “Michigan seats,” all of which are now vacant.

I’m not a big blue slip fan; I like the principle that every Presidential nominee to federal courts and executive agencies should get an up-or-down vote. The reason I am attracted to this idea, however, is that it eliminates the Democratic charge that the GOP keeps changing the rules on judicial nominations — a charge that actually has some validity. When Republicans took the Senate after the 1994 election, Senator Hatch enforced the blue slip rule fairly strictly. Yet when President Bush was elected, Hatch announced he was loosening the blue slip rule. Now, Republicans are observing the traditional rule sporadically, if at all. This allows the Democrats to chrage — correctly — that they are being denied some of the traditional means of slowing down or blocking judicial nominees. Again, even though I’d like to see the blue slip disappear completely (at least for appellate nominees), the way Republicans have gone about phasing it out is open to charges of hypocrisy and opportunism.

So, what I am suggesting is that Republicans commit to observing the blue slip requirement for Bush’s nominees. This would mean that Dems could block nominees who would sit in states with one or more Democratic Senators, but it would also mean that most of the currently stalled nominees would go through, and Bush’s confirmation rate for appellate judges would match that for prior Presidents.