It is a month before the midterm elections when Republicans are at serious risk of losing control of both the House and Senate. There is still time, of course, for the GOP to retain both despite the lack of energy and enthusiasm among the base thanks largely to the abysmal candidates the Democrats are putting forward.
The Senate is literally sitting on hundreds of bills that have passed the House thanks to the flaccid “leadership” of Majority Leader John Thune and a handful of RINOs, several of whom were defeated in their primaries a few months ago but who are sticking it to America on their way out.
Losing the House will mean two years of endless showboating and investigations of Trump by the Democrats, effectively ending any further progress towards securing the border, removing illegal aliens from our country, ferreting out fraud, waste and abuse, curtailing election cheating, reducing bureaucratic regulations that hamper economic growth, and putting the radical DSA Democrats in charge.
Losing the Senate will produce even more dire consequences, including the inability to confirm conservative judges and Justices appointed by President Trump. Trump has, unfortunately, selected his own share of squishes over the last couple of years. But squishes will be the best we can hope for if Democrats control the confirmation process.
So with that in mind, it is absolutely vital to move through as many conservative lifetime judicial appointments right now before the midterm elections bring the possibility of a shift in control of the Senate. Surely Senator Marsha Blackburn is aware of that. Senator Bill Hagerty definitely is.
Yet, Blackburn is using the archaic “blue slip” privilege in the Senate to block a Trump nominee to a vacant U.S. district judge slot in East Tennessee. A member of the judiciary committee in the Senate, such as Blackburn, can block the appointment of a judge in their home state as a manner of Senate courtesy and thereby prevent confirmation hearings and votes from proceeding in the committee. That is what Marsha Blackburn has done to Trump nominee Samuel Adkisson. https://fedsoc.org/bio/samuel-adkisson
She has given no explanation. Is it pettiness over Trump not endorsing her during the gubernatorial primary? Does she have a preference for some other potential nominee who has donated heavily to her campaign or consultant? Is there some personal issue that she has with Adkisson? As Nate Bargatze might say: “nobody knows.”
Samuel Adkisson serves as Associate Counsel to the President in the White House Counsel’s Office. Adkisson previously practiced law at Cooper & Kirk PLLC, where he focused on high-stakes civil-rights, political, and constitutional disputes.
His matters included class actions challenging the FAA’s race-based air traffic controller hiring practices and the University of Oklahoma’s financial aid policies; appellate work on behalf of X Corp.; and the successful defense of Florida’s actions during a 2024 abortion referendum. Before joining Cooper & Kirk, he worked on the landmark case challenging Harvard’s affirmative action policies and helped launch a successful challenge to the State Bar of Texas’s membership policies.
Adkisson clerked for Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts, Jr., Judge Amul R. Thapar of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and Judge Gregory G. Katsas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. During Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, he worked for Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Charles E. Grassley.
Adkisson received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was President of the Yale Law School Federalist Society and an editor of the Yale Law Journal. He graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University. Prior to joining the Trump Administration in January 2025, he lived on Signal Mountain, TN, with his wife and three children.
Blackburn has heavily criticized the judicial blue slip process in the past — particularly when Democrats bypassed home-state senator consultation for nominees like Andre Mathis and Kevin Ritz to the Sixth Circuit. Now she is hypocritically employing the tactic herself by withholding a blue slip to block Trump’s nominee in Tennessee.
When Democrats applied this same standard to Sixth Circuit nominees from Tennessee, Blackburn labeled it a “breach of constitutional norms” and an “insulting” backroom deal. Blackburn needs to immediately come clean and reveal what “back room deal“ is now motivating her.
Steve Gill is an attorney and editor of TriStar Daily.
