After 8 years, we finally got our 7th Circuit judge — as the Senate votes in defiance of Tammy Baldwin.

The Wisconsin State Journal reports:

The Senate voted along party lines to confirm Milwaukee attorney Michael Brennan to fill an opening on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The tally was 49-46. The seat has been open for more than eight years, the longest ever for the nation’s appellate courts.

The Senate gives lawmakers a chance to weigh in on a judicial nominee from their home state by submitting a blue-colored form called the “blue slip.” A positive blue slip signals the Senate to move forward with the nomination process. A negative blue slip, or withholding it altogether, signals a senator’s objection and almost always stalls the nomination.

Until this year, it had been nearly three decades since the Senate confirmed a judge without two positive blue slips. Brennan’s confirmation marked the second time it has happened this year. Baldwin declined to return her blue slip.

The move to go ahead with a hearing for Brennan and a vote on the floor had Democrats complaining that Republicans were eroding one of the few remaining customs in the Senate that forced consultation on judicial nominations.

“I’d admonish my friends on the other side of the aisle, this is a very dangerous road you’re treading,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “As everyone knows, the winds of political change blow swiftly in America. The minority one day is the majority the next.”...

For Democrats, it was particularly galling that Republican Sen. Ron Johnson used his blue slip to object to Obama nominee Victoria Nourse to serve on the 7th Circuit....

“How is Sen. Baldwin’s right to consult on judges for her state any less important than Sen. Johnson’s?” Schumer said. “It’s mind-bending hypocrisy. It’s an appalling double standard.”

Here's the post I wrote back in 2010, when Obama nominated Nourse, who was, like me at the time, a Wisconsin Law School professor. Here's a National Review article by Ed Whelan from 2011, "The Blue-Slip Privilege and Seventh Circuit Nominee Victoria Nourse":

As I’ve made clear, I’m no fan of the Senate’s blue-slip policy, the internal Senate procedure that gives senators in a particular state special power to obstruct executive-branch and judicial nominations in their state. I’m especially not an admirer of the expanded version of the blue-slip policy that Democrats extracted from then-chairman Specter in the Bush 43 years—which gave individual senators an effective veto even over federal appellate judgeships associated with their states (even though the laws do not assign appellate judgeships by state and the caseload of an appellate judge has no more connection to one state than to any other in a circuit). As I explained at the end of the Bush 41 presidency, “This Senate Republican conferral of extraordinary leverage on obstructionist Democrats explains, for example, why a Fourth Circuit seat regarded as belonging to Maryland has been vacant throughout Bush’s presidency—and why so many other seats were filled with compromise candidates.”

I put the boldface on "expanded version" because of the stress — in the new article — on the idea of the Senate's "customs."