U.S. President Joe Biden’s pick for a seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals appeared to be in jeopardy on Thursday after a third Democratic senator said that she would vote against his nomination.
Adeel Mangi, a partner at Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, would be the first Muslim-American federal appellate judge. However, his confirmation has faced heated opposition over his advisory board memberships at a pair of controversial legal advocacy groups, including a Rutgers University center that one Republican senator called a “mouthpiece for Hamas.”
Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) said that “given the concerns I’ve heard from law enforcement in Nevada, I am not planning to vote to confirm this nominee.”
Opponents of Mangi’s nomination and judicial experts told JNS on Wednesday that the attorney’s confirmation would likely have been impossible even before Rosen’s announcement, given that Democrats hold a two-seat majority of 51-49 in the Senate.
Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, a group that opposes Mangi’s nomination, laid out the case for why Mangi’s associations were disqualifying.
“Mangi recently served on the advisory board of a shadowy Rutgers law-school group called the Center for Security, Race and Rights,” Davis told JNS. “This group held events featuring pro-Islamist, anti-Israel propaganda and brought in anti-Israel speakers, including Sami Al-Arian, a former professor and convicted felon who pleaded guilty in federal courts to funding the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”
The center posted on Oct. 31, less than a month after Hamas’s terror attack, that “to assess Hamas’s Oct. 7 operation and the Israeli regime’s subsequent response in isolation is to ignore over 75 years of colonial violence and the horrific consequences born out of these decades of oppression and attempted erasure.”
“That, to me, proves that Mangi has horrific judgments that he would be associated in a leadership role with this group,” Davis said.
‘You have a level of responsibility’
At Mangi’s confirmation hearing and in his response to written follow-up questions from senators, Mangi repeatedly denied that he shared those views and condemned terrorism, the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel and antisemitism.
He said that his involvement with the center was limited to an annual meeting, that he was unaware of the events or speakers that it hosted, and that he resigned from the advisory board in July 2023.
The nominee’s supporters accused Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee of Islamophobia and McCarthyism, with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the committee chair, reading a letter from the Anti-Defamation League that accused Republicans of “berating” Mangi with “endless questions that appear to have been motivated by bias towards his religion.”
Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute who has written extensively about nomination battles, told JNS that despite the pushback, asking judicial nominees about their associations with bigoted groups is fair game.
“With Mangi, the issue isn’t so much that he was orchestrating antisemitic programming or what have you,” Shapiro said. “The idea is, if you’re on a board, if you’re on an advisory council, if you’re involved in some way with an organization, you have a level of responsibility. So, you either knew, or you should have known.”
“Either way, it doesn’t look very good,” Shapiro said.
Mangi has also faced opposition from law enforcement organizations over his advisory board membership at the Alliance of Families for Justice. The criminal justice reform group was co-founded by Kathy Boudin, a former member of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group who pleaded guilty to felony murder for her role in the 1981 Brink’s robbery in which two police officers and a Brink’s security guard were killed. (Her son, Chesa Boudin, is a former San Francisco district attorney.)
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), the first Democrat to announce her opposition to Mangi, specifically cited the Alliance of Families for Justice. She was joined by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who said on Friday that Mangi was not a “reasonable” nominee.
Russell Wheeler, a nonresident senior fellow for governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told JNS that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) now faces a choice about how to proceed with Mangi’s nomination.
“The only question is whether or not the majority leader will bring him forward,” Wheeler said. “He won’t do it unless he’s pretty sure he has the votes, and right now, it seems to me it really depends on whether or not at least one or two Republicans will be willing to support him.”
While recent presidents have had some failed judicial nominees, it’s rare for those candidates to be put to a vote, Wheeler said.
“The last time somebody actually lost the floor vote was during the Clinton administration—a district judge from Missouri,” he said. “That never happens.”
Despite the opposition to Mangi, Schumer could try to engineer a majority by holding a vote when some Republican senators are out of town. But the political consequences of trying to ram through a nominee in that fashion would be disastrous, said Davis, former chief counsel for nominations to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), then the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman.
“The majority leader controls the calendar, and technically Schumer could try to do that, but it would create a nuclear winter in the Senate if they tried to jam that through,” Davis told JNS.
The regular business of the Senate relies on unanimous consent agreements that waive procedural requirements and prevent lengthy, arcane votes on routine motions. Davis said that if Schumer were to pursue the nuclear option, those consent agreements would disappear.
“Any senator could grind the Senate to a halt because you have to operate by unanimous consent so much,” he said.
Davis also seriously doubts that any centrist Republicans, like Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) or Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), would consider voting for Mangi.
The White House has called the effort to defeat Mangi’s nomination part of a “cruel, Islamophobic, smear campaign.” Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, which led an ad campaign opposing Mangi, told JNS that other Muslim nominees to the judiciary would not have faced such criticism.
“If the White House is concerned about being able to say they’ve nominated the first Muslim judge to the Third Circuit, there are definitely other people they could have looked at,” Severino said. “This is not their only option.”
Opposition to Mangi “isn’t about his personal religion. This is about these ties to specifically concerning groups, and the fact that he’s donated thousands of dollars and served on the board of advisors to a group that defended terrorism,” she said.
“Obviously, that’s not the position that all or hopefully most Muslims in this country hold, and there ought to be other qualified candidates,” Severino said.
Davis noted that groups that oppose Biden’s judicial nominations have to be strategic about the battles they pick, given Democratic control of the Senate. Mangi was a particularly poor nominee for the moment, he said.
“At the Article III Project, we have not opposed that many of President Biden’s judicial nominees. We obviously don’t support them, but we have not led an active campaign to oppose very many of them,” he said. “It’s gonna be hard to stop almost all of these judicial nominees, so we have intentionally saved our fire for the worst ones who have the most realistic shot of going down.”
“The timing could not be worse for this nomination after Oct. 7,” he added.
Biden might have an interest in keeping Mangi’s likely doomed nomination alive to pick a fight with Republicans and garner support among Arab, Muslim and progressive voters opposed to Israel. But Shapiro doubts that a seat on the Third Circuit would change the minds of Biden’s critics in key swing states.
“I don’t know how sensitive the voters of Dearborn, Mich., are to a judicial appointment in New Jersey,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s what they really care about.” JNS
