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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Monday on CNN\u2019s The Situation Room that the Supreme Court had \u201cenabled\u201d President Donald Trump to act like a king, calling the situation shameful.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, one thing to understand, as people who are flirting with the Trump administration or doing the bidding of the Trump administration or engaging in the pay-to-play schemes of the Trump administration, the statute of limitations is five years,\u201d the House\u2019s top Democrat said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDonald Trump and this toxic administration will be long gone, but there will still be accountability to be had. And that process, of course, begins now. But it will not be complete until perhaps there is an independent Department of Justice, certainly an independent House of Representatives in Democratic hands,\u201d he claimed.<\/p>\n
It should be noted that Democratic attorneys general and prosecutors, as well as Joe Biden\u2019s Justice Dept., all went after Trump during his four-year hiatus from the White House, engaging in unprecedented actions against a former president.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Department of Justice is one of the great institutions in law enforcement in the history of this country and Donald Trump and these extremists have been destroying its integrity,\u201d Jeffries continued. \u201cAnd we should also blame the conservative justices on the Supreme Court for all of the things that we see happening, because they basically gave this president blanket presidential immunity in a country where the framers of the Constitution said, we don\u2019t want a king.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve effectively enabled Donald Trump at times to behave just like a king. That needs to be revisited as well. The Supreme Court, shame on them for what they\u2019ve done to this country and unleashing this out-of-control behavior that needs to be reversed,\u201d he said, without acknowledging the fact that even liberal justices on the court have regularly sided with the president and his administration.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump is once again upping the pressure on Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to do away with a century-old Senate tradition that places some constraints on the president’s authority to appoint judicial nominees.<\/p>\n
Trump is targeting the Senate’s “blue slip” tradition, a time-honored Senate process that gives senators the right to approve or object to nominees nominated to serve as federal judges or U.S. attorneys in their home states.<\/p>\n
Senators approve of a nominee by returning their blue slip to the Judiciary Committee Chairman. If a senator does not return their blue slip or returns it with objections, the nominee does not advance. In blue states like\u00a0New York, some of Trump’s judicial nominees have stalled out because Democratic senators have not returned blue slips.<\/p>\n
In a post on his social media platform on Sunday evening, Trump made his continued displeasure with this Senate tradition known.<\/p>\n
I have a Constitutional Right to appoint Judges and U.S. Attorneys, but that RIGHT has been completely taken away from me in States that have just one Democrat United States Senator,” Trump said. “This is because of an old and outdated “custom” known as a BLUE SLIP, that Senator Chuck Grassley, of the Great State of Iowa, refuses to overturn, even though the Democrats, including Crooked Joe Biden (Twice!), have done so on numerous occasions.”<\/p>\n
This isn’t the first time that Trump has gone after blue slips and Grassley. But Grassley has consistently committed to maintaining the Senate tradition.<\/p>\n
In a post on X on Monday, Grassley once again defended the Senate process.<\/p>\n
“A U.S. Atty\/district judge nominee without a blue slip does not hv the votes to get confirmed on the Senate floor\u00a0& they don’t hv the votes to get out of cmte,” Grassley posted. “As chairman I set Pres Trump noms up for SUCCESS NOT FAILUREThe 100 yr old “blue slip” allows home state senators 2 hv input on US attys\u00a0& district court judges In Biden admin Republicans kept 30 LIBERALS OFF BENCH THAT PRES TRUMP CAN NOW FILL W CONSERVATIVES.”<\/p>\n
But Grassley’s pushback has not dissuaded Trump from trying to force modifications to the process.<\/p>\n
While speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump doubled down, saying he would file a lawsuit to challenge the use of blue slips, though he did not say who he intended to file suit against. He then blamed Grassley for a lag in the advancement of his appointees to be judges and U.S. attorneys.<\/p>\n
“It’s a gentlemen’s agreement that’s about 100 years old, where if you have a president like a Republican, and if you have a Democrat senator, that senator can stop you from appointing a judge or or U.S. attorney in particular,” Trump said. “And this is based on an old custom. It’s not based on a law … And I think it’s unconstitutional. And I’ll probably be filing a suit on that pretty soon.”<\/p>\n
The Senate has the authority to govern itself and typically retains authority to make its own rules and traditions. Blue slips are not codified in the Senate rules, but are rather a courtesy observed by the committee chairman.<\/p>\n
The blue slip process goes back to at least 1917, according to the Congressional Research Service. Since the use of blue slips is not codified or in the committee’s rules, the chair has the discretion to determine whether a home state senator’s negative or withheld blue slip stops a judicial nomination from receiving consideration by the committee and whether it reaches the Senate floor.<\/p>\n
Trump explicitly expressed his desire to advance nominees like Jay Clayton, who was appointed to serve as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York by Manhattan federal judges earlier this month despite his nomination being stalled in the Senate by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s refusal to return a blue slip on the nominee.<\/p>\n
“That’s the only way you get by. But generally speaking, you can’t do that because you’ll have judges from the other party. So, so Jay Clayton just got approved and he’s in, but he didn’t get approved by the senators, Trump said.<\/p>\n
Trump said the blue slip process was a barrier for him to get any Republican judges through — that he can now “only get a Democrat U.S. attorney.”<\/p>\n
“The only person that I can get approved are Democrats or maybe weak Republicans. But we don’t want that. But the only person I will be able to get approved in any of those states where you have a Democrat will I can’t get a U.S. attorney. I can only get a Democrat U.S. attorney,” Trump said.<\/p>\n
Still, Senate Republicans are generally opposed to modifying the tradition.<\/p>\n
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who serves on the Judiciary Committee and announced earlier this year he wouldn’t seek re-election next year, said in a post on X Monday that getting rid of the blue slip is “short-sighted.”<\/p>\n
“Chairman Grassley is a principled conservative who wants to keep radical liberals off the bench. Getting rid of the blue slip is a terrible, short-sighted ploy that paves the path for Democrats to ram through extremist liberal judges in red states over the long-term,” Tillis posted. “It’s why radical liberal groups have been pushing to get rid of the blue slip for years — Republicans shouldn’t fall for it.”<\/p>\n
A number of Senate Republicans spoke out when Trump last called for changes to the Senate process in July.<\/p>\n
At the time, Majority Leader John Thune expressed little interest in making modifications.<\/p>\n
“I think that the blue slip process is something that’s been used for a long time by both sides, and neither side has violated its usage in the past,” Thune said in July. “So my view on it is and I’m happy to hear what Sen. Grassley and some of my colleagues say, “but no, I don’t think there’s any strong interest in changing that up here.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Monday on CNN\u2019s The Situation Room that the Supreme Court had \u201cenabled\u201d President Donald Trump to act like a king, calling the situation shameful. \u201cYou…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11115,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hot-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t