Democratic cowardice, GOP anti-Muslim hatred threaten historic court pick

When Adeel Mangi appeared before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee in December, the hearing should have been uneventful. But instead, Senate Republicans turned it into an anti-Muslim spectacle.

Mangi has been nominated for a seat on the powerful Philadelphia-based US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

His resume is stellar and checks all the traditional boxes for judicial nominees from Democratic and Republican administrations alike. He's highly educated, with law degrees from both Oxford University and Harvard Law School. And he has spent his entire career working at a prestigious white shoe corporate law firm in New York.

The Senate hearing should also have showcased the historic nature of his nomination. Mangi is a Muslim American and, if confirmed, would be the first Muslim American federal appellate court judge (and the third Muslim American federal judge overall) in the United States.

It's an important milestone and just the latest step forward in the Biden administration's laudable efforts to rebalance the federal bench to better reflect the nation's diversity.

What happened

I watch nearly all Senate Judiciary Committee nomination hearings. You rarely learn much about the nominees themselves or their views on legal issues, but you can learn a lot about the committee members by their questions and the manner in which they treat the nominees.

Last October for example, during a hearing for Oregon district court nominee Mustafa Kasubhai—another Muslim American who had served as a state and federal magistrate judge for more than 15 years—Senator Ted Cruz of Texas offered a poem that the nominee had written decades ago while in law school as evidence of his supposed Marxist beliefs.

Mangi's December 2023 hearing featured similar grandstanding. The timing of his hearing is important to note. A week before, several prominent university presidents testified before the Republican-led House Education Committee about their efforts to combat anti-Semitism on campus.

The hearings went disastrously for the university presidents, whose answers failed to convey how seriously they took the problem in the wake of the October 7 attack on Israel.

By the end of the week, one president had resigned and the others remained under fire (a second would resign a few weeks later). It was a major win for Republicans against so-called "liberal elite" institutions.

The following week, Senate Republicans trotted out the same disingenuous playbook at Mangi's hearing. They focused on Mangi's service as an advisory board member to Rutgers Law School's Center for Security, Race and Rights.

The center co-sponsored an event marking the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, which featured as a speaker a person who had previously pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge involving Palestinian Islamic Jihad organisation.

The center did not pick the speaker, and Mangi was unaware of the event and did not attend it. As an advisory board member, he had no oversight or governance power, and did not "provide advice or approval on specific events, lectures, or workshops."

Nevertheless, Cruz asked Mangi if he condemned "the atrocities of the Hamas terrorists." Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas asked Mangi if he believed that "Zionist settler colonialism was a provocation that justified Hamas's atrocity against Jews in Israel." And Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana asked Mangi if this event was how he "celebrate(d) 9/11."

In all cases, Mangi—who was answering these questions in front of his children—kept his cool and condemned terrorism and any purported justifications for it, and called the October 7 attacks "a horror involving the deaths of innocent civilians."

Stoking anti-Muslim sentiments

It should come as no surprise that Republicans are openly stoking the fires of anti-Muslim hatred for political gain.

The Republican Party's standard-bearer and 2024 presidential nominee, Donald Trump, banned Muslims from entering the United States weeks into his first term. In his effort to win again, Trump has taken to echoing Nazi leader Adolf Hiter and other fascists, saying repeatedly that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country."

It's also hard to take Republican concern about rising anti-Semitism seriously, given their lockstep support of Trump's candidacy. New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik—the face of the House Committee's crusade against anti-Semitism—is one of Trump's staunchest allies.

It apparently does not matter that Trump said during his presidency that there were "very fine people, on both sides" of the Charlottesville neo-Nazi march in 2017, or that he took a meeting at Mar-a-Lago with white nationalist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes.

It also doesn't seem to matter that more than 15 Jewish advocacy groups, including the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League—have endorsed Mangi's nomination.

To their credit, both the White House and Mangi have fought back against these baseless attacks.

Mangi called them "categorically false, misinformed, and mistaken." The White House condemned the "uniquely hostile attacks" against Mangi "because of his Muslim faith," and reiterated that Mangi "represents the best of America, and when confirmed, Mr. Mangi will not only make history — he will make an outstanding judge."

Time running out

Unfortunately, the bad-faith, dog-whistle attacks appear to be working.

At least three Democratic Senators—Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Joe Manchin of West Virginia—have publicly opposed the nomination on the flimsiest of grounds. As much as Republicans are to blame for perpetrating this smear campaign, so too are the Democrats who have fallen for it.

And so in this election year, the White House finds itself between a rock and a hard place. Mangi's nomination is historic and he is exceptionally well-qualified for the post.

If confirmed, he would evenly balance the 14-member Third Circuit, which currently has seven judges appointed by Republicans and six appointed by Democrats.

But given the opposition, confirmation is far from guaranteed. And time is running out.

If the White House sticks with Mangi on principle, it risks handing the seat to a potential Republican administration and Senate in 2025. If the White House pulls the plug and nominates someone else, it may be seen as caving to anti-Muslim hatred.

Whatever happens, the treatment of Adeel Mangi by Republicans and Democrats alike has already left a stain on the Senate and the federal judiciary.