MATT MARGOLIS:
“…President Trump has been remaking the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, shifting further and further to the right. On Wednesday he got another victory with the confirmation of Kenneth Lee in a 52-45 vote. And Democrats are really miffed about this one.
Lee’s confirmation came despite neither Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, nor Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), a 2020 presidential contender, returning a blue slip on his nomination. The blue-slip rule — a precedent upheld by Senate tradition — has historically allowed a home-state senator to stop a lower-court nominee by refusing to return the blue slip to the Judiciary Committee. How strictly the precedent is upheld is decided by the committee chairman, and enforcement has varied depending on who wields the gavel.
Lee who had a unanimously “well qualified” rating from the American Bar Association, is Trump’s 40th circuit judge to be confirmed, even though Democrats were hoping to block his nomination.
Since the Democrats don’t have a majority in the Senate, and Harry Reid nuked the filibuster back in 2013, Democrats were hoping to use the blue slip tradition to obstruct Trump’s judges, even though it was not meant to be a de facto veto on judicial nominees, and according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), “over the century of the use of the blue slip, different chairmen have used the blue slip in different ways.”…”