The Senate Judiciary Committee

The Senate Committee on the Judiciary was also one of the original standing committees of December 10, 1816. Its early work was mostly legislation on courts and crimes, and for its first century it rarely held hearings on nominees. The first nominee to appear publicly before it was Harlan Fiske Stone in 1925, and the practice of public testimony by every Supreme Court nominee began with John Marshall Harlan II in 1955. Today the committee's confirmation hearings are among the most watched events in American politics.

Every nomination to a federal judgeship, from district courts to the Supreme Court, is referred to Judiciary, along with the nominations of the Attorney General and senior Justice Department officials, U.S. Attorneys, and U.S. Marshals. The committee reviews questionnaires and FBI background reports, holds hearings, and votes to report each nominee to the full Senate. Its legislative jurisdiction covers federal criminal law, the courts, constitutional amendments, immigration and naturalization, antitrust, intellectual property, and civil liberties, and it oversees the Justice Department and the FBI.

The committee has about 22 members. For district court and U.S. Attorney nominees it long honored the blue slip, the practice of not proceeding unless both home-state senators returned a slip of approval, which gave senators of the opposing party an effective veto. The committee dropped the requirement for appellate nominees in 2017 but has largely kept it for district judges and U.S. Attorneys, a practice that became contested again in 2025 when the President urged its abolition.

The committee's hearings have defined eras in the fight over the courts: the rejection of Robert Bork in 1987, the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991, the refusal to consider Merrick Garland in 2016, and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in 2018. Since the Senate eliminated the filibuster for nominations in 2013 and 2017, party-line votes have become the norm, and the committee's role has shifted from deciding outcomes to framing the public case for and against each nominee.