itstargetnews
newYou can listen to Fox News articles now!
Senate Republicans confirm six presidents donald trump Judicial nominees last week continued apace to approve as many as possible.
While Senate Republicans are moving quickly to confirm Trump’s judicial nominees, the president and some of his allies want to see the Senate’s century-long tradition of providing bipartisan guardrails for the judicial nomination process dismantled.
they think Blue Skate Tradition Republicans are slowing their efforts to certify the election, while Democrats are holding the process hostage.
Trump deletes ‘racist’ post after Republican backlash, White House says he didn’t know
President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One as he flies from Washington to West Palm Beach, Florida, on January 31, 2026. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
“Canceling the Blue Skate would be a huge mistake,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis told Fox News Digital.
Tillis, like several other Republicans, sees the blue vote as a valuable tool for the minority, a tradition that Republicans will inevitably need to use to their advantage when Democrats regain control of the upper chamber.
The Senate has confirmed 33 judges since the start of Trump’s second term, a number that dwarfs the total number of judicial nominees to the upper chamber in Trump’s first round of the White House, including U.S. attorneys and district and circuit court judges.
Republicans resist change, Trump takes aim at Senate’s ‘blue leak’ tradition
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis warned that repealing the blue slip would be a bad move as the Senate rushes to confirm President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)
In the first year of his first term, the Senate confirmed 19 Article III nominees, including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.
While Republicans are far ahead of Trump’s first clip, Democrats under former president Joe Biden Still beats them on this metric. Biden confirmed 42 judicial nominees in his first year in office.
It remains to be seen whether the Senate can surpass the final total of 234 judicial nominees received during Trump’s first term, but for now the blue vote appears to be safe.
Still, Trump railed against the approach in the Oval Office late last year, arguing that Republicans should “get off the blue sheet because as a Republican president, I can’t put anybody in office who has a relationship with a lawyer or a judge in the United States.”
Chuck Grassley, Republican senator from Iowa and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, speaks during a hearing in Washington on September 16, 2025. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Much of his frustration with the House of Lords, a tradition that has existed for more than 100 years, is likely to stem from Alina Haba Lindsey Halligan cheated on her husband last year.
He vented his frustrations on the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republicans are vocal supporters of the approach, along with others who want to keep the tradition alive.
Notably, Grassley modified that tradition in 2017 to allow circuit court judges to bypass the process, further increasing the number of judges Republicans were able to confirm under Trump despite Democratic opposition.
Click here to download the Fox News app
Asked whether the pace of Senate confirmations of judicial nominees was further confirmation that blue votes were here to stay, Grassley told Fox News Digital, “This doesn’t need to be a current issue.”
“Because this is a 110-year-old issue, everyone in the Senate wants to keep it blue,” Grassley said.
