Senate Republicans could be headed for a bloody internal brawl if they hang onto the chamber this midterm — and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) gets a big promotion, Politico reported on Wednesday.
President Donald Trump has long fumed over the "blue slip," a Senate tradition letting home-state senators — including Democrats — effectively veto district court judges, federal marshals and U.S. attorneys nominated in their state. Lee, an avid Trump advocate, is next in line to chair the powerful Judiciary Committee if the GOP keeps its majority, putting him in position to finally give the president what he is demanding.
"The decision risks pitting Lee against his Senate GOP colleagues, many of whom support the status quo. It also all but guarantees a public pressure campaign from Trump, with whom Lee has worked to ingratiate himself over the past two years," Politico reported.
Lee isn't promising to blow the whole thing up, though, Politico reported.
"There is no appetite to just get rid of them," he remarked, adding that "the blue slip itself has had a lot of evolution and it's almost never static," even if he called it "premature" to detail his plans, noting past chairs had made "iterative changes" as needed.
Trump has been blunter, branding the practice an "old and ridiculous custom" on Truth Social and blasting current Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) — who has repeatedly refused to scrap it — over letting "this scam to continue."
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said he'd fight to keep blue slips alive in committee and on the floor. "I know who is qualified in my state to be a federal judge a lot better than somebody in Washington, D.C., does," Kennedy said, predicting colleagues would simply "outvote" Lee if he tried to kill the custom.
That math could doom Lee's ambitions with the GOP's Senate cushion expected to shrink next Congress. He'd need "nearly every Republican on the committee" — and in the chamber — to back him, a tall order after Trump's attacks already strained relations with his own party, the report states.