For judicial nominations, senators participate in what's known as the "blue-slip" process. If senators support a nominee, they return blue slips of paper to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee signaling their approval. If they withhold the blue slips—as Wyden and Merkley have done out of concern over, among other issues, conservative views Bounds expressed in writings while an undergraduate at Stanford—that's historically been enough to submarine a nomination. Not this year.