Scott Colom’s victory in the Mississippi US Senate race feels like a when, not an if. With 96% of the vote in, Colom leads by more than 2,000 votes, with the outstanding vote expected to favor the Democratic candidate.
There will be a legal battle over these results, but at the end of the process, Democrats are increasingly expecting Scott Colom to be the next US Senator from the state of Mississippi.
In 2023, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith used the blue slip process to block Colom from being appointed to the US District Court in Mississippi as a federal judge.
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As Bobby Harrison wrote for Mississippi Today at the time:
The “blue slip” process Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is using to block the nomination of Scott Colom of Columbus to the federal judiciary began under a previous Mississippi senator who used the process to discriminate against Black Americans.
Starting in the 1950s, U.S. Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi was the first Senate Judiciary Committee chair to use the process to allow a single home-state senator to block a presidential nominee to the federal bench. Eastland used the process to block federal judges from being appointed in Southern states sympathetic to school desegregation, according to multiple accounts detailed in news stories and scholarly research articles.
The process was originally used by Southern Senators to discriminate against black Americans.
Hyde-Smith blocked 3 of the 4 Biden federal judicial nominees to her state, but what is happening in 2026 is karma getting revenge.