America has rarely seemed as polarized as it does today. A Gallup poll released this year found just 34 percent of those surveyed identified as moderate, down from a high of 43 percent in 1992. While there are still many moderate Americans, ideologues increasingly control our two dominant parties.

And these individuals aren’t just fierce advocates of their causes. In 2014, Stanford’s Shanto Iyengar and Princeton’s Sean J. Westwood published “Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization.” Their research showed party preference is now a crucial factor in how many people judge each other — a factor more powerful than race. As a result, what we’ve seen in America in recent decades is “the transformation of party affiliation into a form of personal identity that reached into almost every aspect of our lives,” as a Vox story on Iyengar and Westwood put it.

Against this disheartening backdrop, it’s sad to report the days of one of the traditions of our federal government that encourages moderation and bipartisanship — the Senate Judiciary Committee’s “blue slip” process — may be numbered. Built on traditions of “Senate courtesy” in which senators are deferred to on some matters involving their home states, the process took shape in the early 20th century. It prevents a president’s judicial nomination from advancing to a vote of the full Senate unless the nominee is supported by both of his or her home-state senators, indicated by returning a blue nomination form to the Senate Judiciary chair.

A 2013 Congressional Research Service report found that while some Judiciary Committee chairs and majority leaders were more likely than others to honor the “blue slip” process, the Senate had a long history of making clear to the White House the importance of working with home-state senators in choosing federal court nominees. This has had the hugely positive effect of making presidents more likely to pick judges with at least some moderate inclinations than judges whose worldviews — like Antonin Scalia on the right and Ruth Ginsburg on the left — often seem to drive their decisions as much as the specifics of the cases before them.


But last week, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said he was going to bypass the “blue slip” process with Trump administration nominees for judges on the 5th and 8th districts of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Since these appellate courts both cover more than one state, this isn’t as strong a break with tradition as some reports suggest. Past Senate Judiciary chairs have made a distinction between nominees for federal trial courts and appellate courts. But it’s telling that veteran Senate Republicans like Grassley — first elected in 1980 — are as ready to abandon long-held traditions like the “blue slip” process as young firebrands like Tom Cotton of Arkansas — elected in 2014.

This can only help the Trump administration’s project to use GOP control of the White House and Senate to quickly install as many young, highly conservative judges on federal appellate courts as possible — a sharp escalation of the hardball over judicial nominees that has been building for decades.

A Nov. 11 analysis in The New York Times noted this approach may be copied by Democrats when they return to power. And so the U.S. may be well on its way to having a federal court system that’s as riven by ideology as the legislative branch.

This is not healthy. If America’s most powerful institutions are as divided as Americans on extreme ends of the political spectrum, then our future is imperiled — because middle ground and progress on crucial issues will be far more difficult to find.


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