In November 2026, Mississippians will pick a United States senator. One of the two names on that ballot is a man the other one personally kept off the federal bench.

That is not a figure of speech. In April 2023, Cindy Hyde-Smith blocked Scott Colom's nomination to be a federal judge in the Northern District of Mississippi. She didn't lose a vote. She didn't lose a debate. There was never a vote or a debate, because she made sure there couldn't be one — by declining to hand in a piece of paper.

Three years later, Colom won the Democratic primary in a landslide — the Associated Press called it with him at 73% — and became the man standing between her and another term.

What a "blue slip" is, and who invented the version she used

When a president nominates someone to a federal district court, the Senate Judiciary Committee sends a blue-colored slip of paper to each senator from that nominee's home state. Return it, and the process moves forward. Don't return it, and — under the way the committee has run for most of the last 70 years — the nomination simply stops. No hearing. No committee vote. No floor vote. Nothing.

That absolute veto is not in the Constitution. It's not in Senate rules. One man made it up, and Mississippians have heard of him.

Starting in 1956, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi became the first Judiciary chairman to let a single home-state senator kill a nominee outright, and he did it for a reason. Eastland used the blue slip to keep judges sympathetic to school desegregation off Southern courts, in the years right after Brown v. Board of Education.

You don't have to take a liberal group's word for that. Here is Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, writing in 2017 while he chaired the same committee:

"For the vast majority of the blue slip's history, a negative or unreturned blue slip did not stop the Senate Judiciary Committee from holding a hearing and vote on a nominee. In fact, of my 18 predecessors as chairman of the committee, only two allowed home-state senators unilateral veto power through the blue slip. The first to do so, Sen. James Eastland (D-Miss.), reportedly adopted this policy to thwart school integration after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education."

Scholars who studied the practice landed in the same neighborhood. A paper by professors from Georgia, Michigan State and Wisconsin wrote that why Eastland changed the policy "is unclear, though racial politics likely had something to do with it, as Eastland could use committee rules to block pro-civil rights nominees from reaching the bench."

That is the tool Hyde-Smith reached for. And the man she used it on is the first African American elected district attorney for the 16th District in north Mississippi.

The two reasons she gave

On Tuesday, April 4, 2023, Hyde-Smith gave a statement to the Magnolia Tribune explaining herself — a statement her own Senate website still carries:

"I will not return the blue slip on the nomination of Scott Colom to serve as a U.S. District Court judge for the Northern District of Mississippi. I visited with the District Attorney recently, and I recognize that he is smart and well liked in his district. However, there are a number of concerns I have regarding his record. As someone with a strong interest in protecting the rights of girls and women, I am concerned about Scott Colom's opposition to legislation to protect female athletes. The significant support his campaign received from George Soros also weighs heavily against his nomination in my view. I simply cannot support his nomination to serve on the federal bench in Mississippi for a lifetime."

Two reasons. Look at both.

Reason one: school sports. Colom has never publicly said anything about transgender athletes in women's sports. Mississippi Today checked, and reported plainly that while he "has voiced general support for trans rights, he has never publicly commented on the issue of trans women competing in women sports." What he actually did was sign a 2021 letter opposing efforts "to criminalize transgender people and gender-affirming healthcare" — a letter about putting people in jail and taking away medical care, not about who runs track. She took a position he never took and disqualified him for it.

Reason two: George Soros. A political action committee funded partly by Soros spent money on Colom's first race for district attorney — in 2015. Colom has said he didn't know the PAC had taken Soros money until he read it in the news. And he took no Soros money at all in his 2019 race.

So a prosecutor got vetoed for a stance he never took and a donation he didn't solicit eight years earlier.

The people who wanted him confirmed

This wasn't a party-line fight, which is the part that should stick with Mississippi voters.

• Roger Wicker — Mississippi's senior Republican senator — returned his blue slip. He backed the nomination.
• Haley Barbour and Phil Bryant, both former Republican governors of Mississippi, supported Colom.
• Dick Durbin, then the Judiciary chairman, called Colom "highly qualified," and his office said Durbin was "extremely disappointed" by what Hyde-Smith did.

Wicker told reporters that "quite a lot of mainstream Mississippi Republicans" saw Colom as a strong law-and-order prosecutor. Mississippi's Republican establishment, in other words, was fine with him. One senator wasn't, and one senator was all it took.

The anger over it reached the Mississippi Capitol. In February 2024, when state lawmakers brought up a resolution honoring Hyde-Smith as the first woman Mississippi ever elected to Washington, 11 of the 16 state Senate Democrats simply didn't vote, and a 12th voted present. They said the resolution itself was fine — they were making a point about the judgeship.

"No Democrat opposes the worth of the resolution honoring her," said Senate Minority Leader Derrick Simmons. "But we do feel that it is important that the federal posts in Mississippi that deal with law and order be filled."

Why this is worth your time in an election year

It would be easy to file this under Washington procedure. Don't. This is the clearest look you will get at how Cindy Hyde-Smith uses power when nobody can stop her.

A federal judgeship in north Mississippi is not an abstraction. That court handles civil rights cases, voting cases, criminal cases, business disputes — the machinery of law and order for a big piece of the state. Two Republican governors, the state's senior Republican senator, and the Judiciary chairman all said the nominee was qualified. She overrode every one of them, alone, with a procedure a Mississippi segregationist built for exactly this purpose, and she justified it with two claims that fall apart the moment you check them.

It fits a pattern. When the Senate tried to pass a bill protecting IVF nationwide in 2024 after Alabama clinics started shutting down, Hyde-Smith stood up and killed it with a single objection — again acting alone, again on a bill that needed everyone's consent to move. Given the chance to be the one person who stops something, she takes it.

Mississippi is 48th out of 50 on the measures we track. It is a state that needs its federal posts filled and its problems worked on. What it got, in this instance, was a senator who spent her power on a veto — and who now has to explain it to voters with the vetoed man's name printed right underneath hers.

Source

Lawmakers honor Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, but Dems say it's time for her to allow vote on federal judge — Bobby Harrison, Mississippi Today, February 1, 2024. Photo: Mississippi Today.