Why It Matters
The Senate Judiciary Committee convened on June 18, 2026, for a compressed business meeting that processed eight judicial and executive nominations alongside three legislative bills addressing artificial intelligence, court transparency, and deepfakes. The committee had not met for three weeks due to attendance problems that proved more severe on the Republican side, forcing Chair Chuck Grassley to compress the agenda into a narrow 30-minute window.
The thorniest issue animating the hearing was the blue slip practice, which gives home-state senators veto power over district court and U.S. attorney nominees. Grassley stated that senators have told him they want to retain the blue slip practice, signaling his intention to preserve the tradition. Yet the Trump administration is pushing hard against the practice, particularly in New York. President Trump has made judicial vacancies a top priority, but Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's refusal to return blue slips for New York nominees is creating a standoff that Trump has tied to intelligence community positions and FISA approval.
Trump announced he would not proceed with a new director of intelligence or approve FISA until he gets U.S. attorneys in the Southern District of New York. Schumer has refused to return a blue slip or consider a highly qualified nominee put forth by the president for more than a year. Schumer also refused to consider any nominee for other U.S. attorney or district court seats in New York and refused to even meet with the administration to find a path forward on judicial nominations.
The contrast with prior administrations is stark. During the first Trump and Biden administrations, senators from opposing parties returned hundreds of blue slips for district court and U.S. attorney nominees. During the second Trump term, blue slips have been few and far between compared to previous administrations. For the first time in recorded history, Senate Democrats have not allowed a single civilian nominee to be confirmed by voice vote or unanimous consent.
Grassley stated he would continue the blue slip practice as long as he is chairman, setting up a structural tension between preserving Senate tradition and expediting Trump's judicial agenda.
The Hearing Roundup
Beyond nominations, the committee addressed three bills spanning emerging technology and judicial access. The NO FAKES Act (S.4591) would create a new federal property right protecting individuals' voice and visual likenesses from unauthorized AI-generated replicas. The bill imposes platform liability reaching $750,000 per violation and was reintroduced on May 20, 2026, as the fourth iteration of a measure circulating since a 2023 discussion draft.
The Trump administration supports the NO FAKES Act. The White House's March 20, 2026, National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence explicitly recommended that Congress provide protections for individuals from the unauthorized distribution or commercial use of AI-generated digital replicas of their voice, likeness, or other identifiable attributes, while exempting parody, satire, and First Amendment-protected expression.
Support for the NO FAKES Act spans industry and labor. SAG-AFTRA collected over 16,000 signatures on a letter demanding passage. The RIAA endorsed it as a widely supported consensus bill developed through a bipartisan, bicameral process and championed by American AI developers, the creative community, child safety groups, and conservative groups. The AFL-CIO endorsed the measure, with Director of Advocacy Jody Calemine stating that the NO FAKES Act would provide workers with recourse against digital misappropriation of their labor and deter this practice by holding liable those who produce unauthorized digital likenesses and platforms that knowingly host them.
Opposition, however, comes from digital rights organizations and the video game industry. The Electronic Frontier Foundation signed a letter urging the Senate Judiciary Committee not to advance the NO FAKES Act in its current form. The Entertainment Software Association warned that the bill's definition of "digital replica" is broad enough to expose game studios and development tools to liability for entirely fictional characters that happen to resemble a real person.
The two court-access bills represent rare bipartisan cooperation. Both S.1146, the Cameras in the Courtroom Act, and S.1133, which would provide for media coverage of federal court proceedings, are backed by Chair Grassley and Ranking Member Durbin together. S.1146 requires the Supreme Court to permit television coverage of all open sessions, with the only exception being a majority vote of the justices to block cameras in a specific case where coverage would violate due process. Similar cameras-in-courts legislation has been introduced to the Senate over ten times, but has yet to be voted on by the full Senate. The Senate Judiciary Committee previously voted 15-7 to advance the Cameras in the Courtroom Act in a prior Congress.
The Trump administration has not publicly championed cameras in federal courts as a White House priority. It is primarily a bipartisan legislative effort led by Congress, with Grassley and colleagues in both parties pushing court-transparency bills since 1999.
Tension Over Combined Hearings
Grassley stated the committee must combine oversight with nominations due to the limited time before the election. The Senate meets for only four weeks in July and two weeks in September, totaling six weeks between the hearing and the election. Operating on a three-day work week schedule provides only 18 days between the hearing and the election.
Grassley stated the committee would accommodate Democratic members with all the time they need to ask questions during the combined hearing. Yet Ranking Member Richard J. Durbin was absent from the hearing to attend the opening of the Obama Presidential Library, with Senator Whitehouse filling in. Whitehouse opposed combining the DOJ oversight hearing with the acting Attorney General Todd Blanche nomination hearing. The committee did not combine oversight and nominations hearings when considering Attorney General Garland, creating a precedent that Whitehouse cited.
DOJ Controversies
The Epstein Files and Settlement Disputes
Underlying the DOJ oversight component were serious allegations about the department's handling of sensitive matters. Attorney General Bondy stated that Todd Blanche was responsible for the Epstein files disaster involving the release of private information and images of victims. The Epstein files incident involved a cover-up of documents that named Donald Trump.
More broadly, a slush fund settlement includes an attachment of a tax amnesty deal for Trump, the Trump family, and Trump's businesses. Thirty-five retired federal judges have joined forces across party lines to file a motion in Miami federal court, claiming that President Donald Trump's settlement of his IRS lawsuit amounts to judicial fraud and alleged collusion. Florida Judge Kathleen Williams reopened a case and asked for responses from the Department of Justice. Williams suggested that the DOJ might have violated its own policies in the settlement, and questioned whether there was collusion between Department of Justice lawyers and Trump's private lawyers.
Judges appointed by every president have criticized DOJ arguments as false, pretextual, and designed to fool rather than inform the court. U.S. attorneys have been called out for misconduct repeatedly. Acting U.S. attorneys have been appointed, followed by the firing of the first assistant, and then slipping back into the first attorney position when the acting term expires, leaving a vacancy.
Political Stakes
The nominations carry significant weight for the Trump administration's judicial agenda. Flowers' nomination to the Sixth Circuit would represent a major career capstone and lifetime appointment to a court covering Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Flowers is a former Ohio Solicitor General and Federalist Society member who is a college classmate of Vice President J.D. Vance at Ohio State. His confirmation hearing occurred in May 2026. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) described Flowers' answers as insulting to the role of the Judiciary Committee and the intelligence of its members, particularly on questions about judicial ethics. People For the American Way issued a formal letter of opposition to Flowers' nomination, stating that his record of harmful extremism disqualifies him from a lifetime position on the Sixth Circuit.
Schwartz's nomination proved equally contentious. Schwartz is a Sullivan & Cromwell partner who was part of Trump's legal team urging a New York state appellate court to overturn the president's conviction by a Manhattan jury in 2024. Schwartz told senators he did not know how much money Trump owes his firm and pledged to recuse himself from cases involving Trump. Progressive groups Demand Justice and the Alliance for Justice flagged Schwartz's nomination for scrutiny.
The compressed timeline reflects broader pressure. There were eight months between Attorney General Garland's nomination and his first hearing, providing a historical benchmark for the pace of DOJ-related confirmations.
The Bottom Line
The committee's June 18 business meeting marked progress on Trump's judicial slate, but the blue slip standoff and DOJ controversies suggest contentious confirmation battles ahead. The three bills on deepfakes, court cameras, and judicial access face their own legislative hurdles despite bipartisan support in some cases. The NO FAKES Act's broad coalition will test whether consensus can survive opposition from digital rights and gaming interests. The court-access bills, despite prior committee approval, have never advanced to a full Senate vote despite repeated introduction.
The Trump administration has made filling federal judicial vacancies a top priority of its second term, but the blue slip practice and Democratic resistance create structural obstacles that neither Grassley's procedural flexibility nor Trump's leverage over intelligence positions may overcome.
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