Judge of character
Adeel Mangi, an accomplished Manhattan lawyer has committed a heinous offense: he was nominated to the Philadelphia-based federal court of appeals by a Democratic president, and might have generally liberal policies. Republican senators can’t use that as a winning argument, so they have turned to a stunningly Islamophobic smear campaign to paint the first Muslim nominee to the federal appellate bench as some sort of terrorist sympathizer and antisemite — a surprise to the various Jewish legal groups that have backed him.
Never mind that Article VI of the Constitution says: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” That was from 1787, when they knew better.
Still, Democrats, ever prone to stepping on rakes, are rankled by the smear, with Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto announcing this week that she opposes the nomination, likely tanking it.
While Republicans play hardball with judicial confirmations, the Dems are still naïve.
Mitch McConnell had the gall to make up a nonexistent rule about Supreme Court confirmations coming too close to a presidential election to refuse any consideration of Merrick Garland — a rule he promptly jettisoned in ramming through Amy Coney Barrett a week before Joe Biden won the presidency.
McConnell and President Donald Trump then established an assembly line of federal judicial nominees running straight from the Federalist Society to the nation’s courtrooms, installing some cranks like ultra-conservative hatchet man Matthew Kacsmaryk and Trump loyalist Aileen Cannon, among a litany of others often rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. These weren’t less-than-ideal candidates; they were lawyers you wouldn’t trust to handle phony injury claims, let alone reshape policy.
To internalize this and fight as aggressively as the GOP does for judicial nominees wouldn’t be a capitulation to a political vision of law, as some Democrats seem to fear, but actually an effort to rebalance the courts and reduce a very tilted partisanship that has come to dominate them.
This isn’t, by the way, a suggestion that the Democrats simply put up their own cranks, but that they not preemptively throw in the towel when qualified nominees get railroaded by deeply bad faith attacks.
Dig nail-deep into all the innuendo and it becomes clear that the attacks against Mangi boil down to his being a Muslim Democrat. GOP senators simply found they could exploit lingering War on Terror Islamophobia to derail the nomination of a would-be judge unlikely to side with their power grabs.
Not only that, but the smearing advances what has become a core GOP political message: don’t bother trying to enter the public sphere, because you will be piled on with relentless and disingenuous attacks.
The MAGA-fied party has turned “when did you stop beating your wife” into a reflexive strategy, and it will continue to deploy that as long as it works. It’s up to Democrats to stop being played for suckers and make clear that, while scrutiny and criticism comes with the territory of holding public power, there’s nothing to be gained from engaging with overt bad faith.
As GOP leadership toys with an explicitly anti-democratic agenda, the last thing Democratic officials should be doing is making it easy. Show some backbone, and confirm Mangi.