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[Biden judicial nominee to the 3rd Circuit] Adeel Mangi Deserved Better
Balls & StrikesEarlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer struck a deal with his Republican counterparts: In exchange for Republicans dispensing with their procedural efforts to obstruct the confirmations of President Joe Biden’s district court nominees, Democrats would stand down on Biden’s four pending appeals court nominees, ensuring that President-elect Donald Trump will fill those seats instead.
Whether the deal is “good” sort of depends on how hard you think Senate Democrats should be working over the next three weeks to confirm Biden’s remaining nominees. On the one hand, the terms are probably not as bad for Democrats as Fox News, which first broke the story, framed it: Two of the would-be-outgoing appeals court judges are Democratic appointees, and will likely (wearily) rescind their decisions to take senior status in light of this development. My hunch is that the “Republicans Heroically Rescue FOUR Appeals Court Seats From Joe Biden’s Marxist Clutches!” narrative was pitched by Republicans to placate Trump, who has been raging for days at their failure to stop Democrats from confirming nominees during the lame duck—which, for the record, is the same thing that Republican senators were doing four years ago this month.
On the other hand, it is a real bummer that Senate Democrats have elected not to even try to confirm these appeal courts nominees, and are instead choosing a path forward that will allow them to go home at 5 PM every day, skip working weekends, and, if they wrap up the rest of their business in a timely manner, fly out of Washington for the holidays a bit early. A throughline of the past four years of judicial politics has been Senate Democrats failing to adequately prepare for the fight. Now, it seems, they’re content to simply call it off.
For my money, the saddest casualty of this choice is the nomination of Adeel Mangi to a seat on the Third Circuit. If confirmed, Mangi, a New Jersey law firm partner, would be the first-ever Muslim American appeals court judge, which prompted conservative activists to wage a vile, racist smear campaign against him earlier this year. While interrogating Mangi about his previous relationship with a university-affiliated religious freedom research organization, one Republican senator asked about how he “celebrates” September 11, which should, in my view, immediately replace the “beating your wife” formulation as the canonical example of a loaded question in persuasive writing classes.
As I wrote at the time, in an ideal world, the people in charge of confirming judges would not be affected by lazy appeals to rank bigotry. Regrettably, the people in charge of confirming judges are Senate Democrats, who folded in embarrassing, spectacular fashion: Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto announced she would oppose Mangi, and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, the most annoying senator of my lifetime who is not named Jeff Flake, quickly followed suit. As a result, Senate Democrats will soon have the privilege of watching Republicans fill the seat that could have been Mangi’s with some white guy with a monosyllabic first name who makes a recurring monthly donation to the Alliance Defending Freedom, and has prepared a carefully-workshopped non-answer about whether the Constitution allows for the indefinite imprisonment of people who criticize the Supreme Court.
Whether the deal is “good” sort of depends on how hard you think Senate Democrats should be working over the next three weeks to confirm Biden’s remaining nominees. On the one hand, the terms are probably not as bad for Democrats as Fox News, which first broke the story, framed it: Two of the would-be-outgoing appeals court judges are Democratic appointees, and will likely (wearily) rescind their decisions to take senior status in light of this development. My hunch is that the “Republicans Heroically Rescue FOUR Appeals Court Seats From Joe Biden’s Marxist Clutches!” narrative was pitched by Republicans to placate Trump, who has been raging for days at their failure to stop Democrats from confirming nominees during the lame duck—which, for the record, is the same thing that Republican senators were doing four years ago this month.
On the other hand, it is a real bummer that Senate Democrats have elected not to even try to confirm these appeal courts nominees, and are instead choosing a path forward that will allow them to go home at 5 PM every day, skip working weekends, and, if they wrap up the rest of their business in a timely manner, fly out of Washington for the holidays a bit early. A throughline of the past four years of judicial politics has been Senate Democrats failing to adequately prepare for the fight. Now, it seems, they’re content to simply call it off.
For my money, the saddest casualty of this choice is the nomination of Adeel Mangi to a seat on the Third Circuit. If confirmed, Mangi, a New Jersey law firm partner, would be the first-ever Muslim American appeals court judge, which prompted conservative activists to wage a vile, racist smear campaign against him earlier this year. While interrogating Mangi about his previous relationship with a university-affiliated religious freedom research organization, one Republican senator asked about how he “celebrates” September 11, which should, in my view, immediately replace the “beating your wife” formulation as the canonical example of a loaded question in persuasive writing classes.
As I wrote at the time, in an ideal world, the people in charge of confirming judges would not be affected by lazy appeals to rank bigotry. Regrettably, the people in charge of confirming judges are Senate Democrats, who folded in embarrassing, spectacular fashion: Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto announced she would oppose Mangi, and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, the most annoying senator of my lifetime who is not named Jeff Flake, quickly followed suit. As a result, Senate Democrats will soon have the privilege of watching Republicans fill the seat that could have been Mangi’s with some white guy with a monosyllabic first name who makes a recurring monthly donation to the Alliance Defending Freedom, and has prepared a carefully-workshopped non-answer about whether the Constitution allows for the indefinite imprisonment of people who criticize the Supreme Court.
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