I Am Begging Senate Democrats to Do Anything Other Than Help Confirm Trump Judges

If you are a United States senator, there are so, so many things you could be doing at any given moment. Your phone is pinging constantly with pleas from literally dozens of people who would like you to do something for them, ideally immediately, but within the next five minutes would be fine, too. Your scheduler is trying to book you for whichever Sunday morning show they think will show your face on TV the most. Your constituents who are visiting D.C. cannot wait to make early-morning small talk with you over bad pastries and worse coffee. Your social media team is trying to get you to record a 12-second clip to ride the algorithmic coattails of a meme you do not and will never understand. You are but one person in an ill-fitting suit, and there are just too many hearings to attend, too many votes to make, and too many octogenarian megadonors to assure that you are taking their interests very, very seriously.

What I am saying here is that if you are presented with the opportunity to assist Senate Republicans in confirming one of President Donald Trump’s election-denying weirdos to a seat on the federal bench, it is very easy for you to not do so. Earlier this summer, though, three Democratic senators—Michigan’s Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin and Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman—elected to return their “blue slips” for two of Trump’s nominees to district court judgeships in their states: Michael Martin in Michigan, and Antonio Pozos in Pennsylvania.

Blue slips are literal slips of paper that allow home-state senators to signal their approval of a nominee who appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee. By Senate tradition, unless the committee chair receives blue slips from both of a district court nominee’s senators, that nominee does not advance to the Senate floor for a confirmation vote. During the Biden administration, Senate Republicans made liberal use of this rule to preserve red-state judgeships for Trump and his incoming Senate Republican majority to fill instead.

In other words, simply by doing nothing, Peters, Slotkin, and Fetterman could have prevented Trump from filling these vacancies. Instead, they elected to take precious minutes out of their days in order to hustle Martin and Pozos along their paths to life-tenured judgeships. To date, Peters, Slotkin, and Fetterman are the only Democratic senators to return blue slips for any of Trump’s second-term nominees. Thanks to their generosity, the full Senate

To be fair to Martin and Pozos—a courtesy they have not done a blessed thing to earn, but whatever—their résumés are marginally less offensive than those of some of their soon-to-be colleagues on the bench. Like Trump’s other nominees, neither Martin, a federal prosecutor, nor Pozos, a law firm partner, were capable of answering straightforwardly when asked during their hearings whether President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. At the same time, Martin and Pozos are not, for example, former members of Trump’s personal legal team who have written Breitbart blog posts railing against the evils of “woke ideology” and the “abortion industrial complex.” To the best of my knowledge, neither man has delivered a sermon weighing in on whether people with disabilities can participate in a “robust marriage,” or referred to President Barack Obama as a “Halfrican-American” in a college newspaper column.

Even if Martin and Pozos grade out somewhere above an F-minus on the most lenient curve imaginable, however, that does not answer the question of how Peters, Slotkin, and Fetterman could have possibly concluded that greenlighting these confirmations a scant four months before the 2026 midterms is a smart or prudent choice. Trump will still be president in January, sure. But if Democrats take the Senate—not a guarantee, but not a long shot—the politics of judicial confirmations over his final two years in the White House are going to look a lot different.

Every seat matters right now. Had Peters, Slotkin, and Fetterman taken the easiest path available to them—gently placing their blue slips in the nearest recycle bin—they could have held on to two vacancies for a time in the not-so-distant future when Democrats might have a lot more leverage. (Perhaps—just hear me out—Democrats will even be able to negotiate for nominees who don’t play footsie with demented voter-fraud conspiracy theories because they are too chickenshit to say anything that might make Trump upset.) Instead, all three lawmakers decided to give Trump what he wants, and right before the clock runs out.

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