Blue Slip Rules under Senator Specter

Poking around http://bench.nationalreview.com/, and in particular, this post, I ran into the following paragraph by Ed Whelen, from an article in The Weekly Standard ...

Orrin Hatch, Specter's predecessor as chairman, stated clearly in 2003 that he would abide by the same blue-slip policy that Teddy Kennedy and Joe Biden had adopted when they each chaired the committee. Under what Hatch labeled the "Kennedy-Biden-Hatch blue-slip policy," the return of a negative blue slip on a nomination would be given "substantial weight," but a committee hearing and vote on the nomination would proceed. Specter has issued no such statement, and he has not yet held a hearing on any nominee with negative or unreturned blue slips.

http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.2572/pub_detail.asp

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As speculated elsewhere, this would clearly explain the bottling up of certain nominations, in committee.