There was more skullduggery going on in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. Again, as I said last week, if you’re looking for a dedicated and unified majority party in the national legislature, look to what the Republicans are doing as regards the federal judiciary. They are willing to steamroll accepted Senate procedure and longstanding Senate traditions in order to salt Federalist Society All-Stars throughout the federal judiciary. This includes the virtual elimination of the blue-slip courtesy extended to the senators who represent the state in which a nominee currently lives. Through the years, the blue-slip process has bounced between being a simple courtesy and being a de facto rule with occasional stops in places in between. Its salience rested on the whim—or on the politics—of whichever party controlled the Senate.

Last fall, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced his intention to render the blue-slip process once again into a merely advisory device. In 2009, of course, McConnell appealed to then-President Barack Obama to honor the blue-slip process as regards Obama’s nominees. Is there a letter that demonstrates that McConnell is a flaming hypocrite interested only in power and partisan gain? Of course, there is. From the NYT editorial board, last fall:

We hope your Administration will consult with us as it considers possible nominations to the federal courts from our states. Regretfully, if we are not consulted on, and approve of, a nominee from our states, the Republican Conference will be unable to support moving forward on that nominee. Despite press reports that the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee now may be considering changing the Committee’s practice of observing senatorial courtesy, we, as a Conference, expect it to be observed, even-handedly and regardless of party affiliation. And we will act to preserve this principle and the rights of our colleagues if it is not.

Which brings us to Wednesday’s hearing. A Milwaukee lawyer named Michael Brennan was nominated for an empty seat on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin has declined to return her blue slip on Brennan which, in better days, would have deep-sixed his nomination. But Senate Judiciary chairman Charles Grassley has hustled Brennan’s nomination past Baldwin’s objection, and that’s how he came to get a committee hearing on Wednesday.

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The seat has been vacant since 2010, largely because of Republican reluctance to allow Obama to appoint judges as though Obama were president of the United States or something. Nourse’s nomination was blocked by then-newly elected Senator Ron (Shreds of Freedom) Johnson through his use of a blue slip. (There then ensued a tangled mess of an ad hoc bipartisan “commission” set up as a compromise solution between Johnson and his Democratic colleague, Baldwin, which Johnson then gamed in order to delay Nourse’s nomination until it died altogether. The president* ignored the commission entirely and nominated Brennan anyway.) Brennan himself has co-written wrote an op-ed in which he argued that Johnson’s use of the blue slip was proper.

By and large, Brennan is a bog-standard conservative Republican lawyer. He founded the Milwaukee chapter of the Federalist Society. He chaired an advisory committee that recommended nominees for the Wisconsin state supreme court to Governor Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage this particular Midwest subsidiary. Among the jurists recommended by Brennan and that commission was a guy named Daniel Kelly, who once compared affirmative action to slavery, and who wrote that “all authority derives from God Himself.” In the Senate these days, of course, all authority derives from Mitch McConnell’s hypocrisy.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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