On Tuesday night, Raphael Warnock emerged a winner and, perhaps, so did Scott Colom.

Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, defeated Republican challenger Hershel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff election. Given that Democrats already controlled the chamber before the runoff, this might not seem like a big deal.

For the past two years, the Senate has been equally divided: 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. That meant any actions that went strictly along party lines would be determined by Democratic vice president Kamala Harris who presides over the Senate and only votes in the event of a tie.

Warnock’s win secured for the Democrats a 51-49 majority, so any party-line vote favors the Democrats and won’t require a tie-breaking vote from Harris.

But the importance of having a majority in the Senate goes beyond that.

In a 50-50 Senate, committee chairs and committee membership is required to be equally divided. A party-line vote in a 50-50 committee has no means for breaking a tie, which means actions being considered in committees could sometimes languish for months, as committee chairs worked behind the scenes to find at least one cross-over vote.

But a 51-49 majority means committee chairs and membership do not have to be equally divided. A party-line vote in a committee means the Democrats can expedite committee work and send it to the floor, where the same Democratic majority will almost always assure passage.

And that is why Tuesday’s runoff election is so important to Scott Colom.

In October, President Joe Biden nominated Colom for the position of  judge for  U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, replacing Michael Mills who retired in November 2021.

The nomination goes to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will either call for a hearing on Colom’s candidacy or deny it. With a clear Democratic majority in the committee, it would appear to be clear sailing for Colom.

At the minimum, the process should be greatly expedited, since the Democrats don’t have to spend weeks or months trying to convince a Republican committee member to cross the aisle.

But there’s one catch, a Senate tradition called “blue slips.”

The blue slip process allows a home-state senator to stop a judicial nominee’s hearing if either of the senators from the state don’t return their blue slip. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, then the chair of the Judiciary Committee, ended the blue slip requirement for appellate nominations during the Trump administration

But Democrat Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the new judiciary chair, has said he will honor the blue-slip tradition.

So Colom isn’t quite out of the woods yet. Neither Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker or Cindy Hyde-Smith have gone on the record about Colom’s nomination. If either declines to turn in a blue slip, Colom will be denied a hearing before the full Senate and will not be elevated to the federal bench.

Of the two, Wicker appears most amenable to Colom’s nomination while the best guess about Hyde-Smith is that she is currently on the fence.

Colom, the District Attorney for the 16th District since 2016, has support from local attorneys, prosecutors, law enforcement and crime victims, who have sent letters of support to the judiciary committee.

Yet his fate now rests primarily in the hands of Mississippi’s two Republican Senators.

If nothing else, Tuesday’s election should mean we won’t have to wait too long to learn what Wicker and Hyde-Smith intend to do.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

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