Commentary: U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the current chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, can’t let history repeat itself.
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., listens during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing in Washington on June 17, 2021.
When racist and segregationist Mississippi Sen. James Eastland decided senators should have the absolute power to block a president’s nominees for federal judges in their states, he was probably thinking of a moment like this.
It turns out that Eastland knew just what to do. In 1956, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, Eastland became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Knowing the Supreme Court had just given federal judges the power to oversee school desegregation, Eastland decided he and fellow segregationist senators needed the power to control the judicial nominees in their states.
Eastland transformed a blue piece of paper — previously used only to get a senator’s view on nominees from their state — into the power to stop a nominee from receiving a hearing. He did so by refusing to return the blue slip to the chairman — in effect, giving each senator the unilateral power to stop a person from becoming a judge.
But the reality is that Southern Republican senators are using the Eastland version of the blue slip to prevent Biden from appointing judges in states with the most need for civil rights protections.
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