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Blue slips. Remember those? They are actual slips of paper, and they are actually blue. Senators sign them to indicate their approval of judicial nominees from their home states. There is no actual rule about this, however, so whoever's chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee can play games with them pretty easily.

Here's how it works. If you require only one blue slip to proceed, that makes it easier for a president to get his nominees confirmed. If you require two blue slips, it's harder.

So when do you want to make it easier? When the president comes from your own party. When do you want to make it harder? When the president is from the other party. Here's how that's worked:

Patrick Leahy, the Democratic Judiciary Committee chairman from 2007-2014, applied the blue-slip rule impartially regardless of who was president. This was despite a vast level of obstruction from Republicans to all of Obama's nominees. On the one hand, good for Grassley. We could use more displays of integrity like this. On the other hand, Democrats lost out on a whole bunch of judges that they otherwise would have gotten confirmed.

By contrast, Republicans have a two-decade history of flipping the blue-slip rule whenever it conveniences them. Is there really much doubt that Grassley is going to nuke it just as soon as a single Democratic fails to return a blue slip on a Trump nominee and Fox News starts screaming about obstruction? I don't think so.

Read more:
Republicans Are Laying the Groundwork For Their Normal Blue Slip Hypocrisy - Mother Jones