The saga of Adeel Mangi’s nomination to a seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has come to an end – and not in the way Senator Cory Booker or most of his fellow Democrats were hoping for.
In an impassioned speech on the Senate floor tonight, Booker conceded for the first time that Mangi’s nomination will not be successful, which has been increasingly clear for months. Booker’s speech, addressed to Mangi’s two teenage sons, hailed Mangi as an outstanding American and condemned the Senate for allowing his nomination to falter in the face of an onslaught of attacks on Mangi’s character.
“This great body failed your father,” Booker said. “It failed the American people. It is one of the most painful chapters I’ve had in public life. The American people deserve a government that … upholds the ideals that are so core to this country: that everyone is created equal, that there should be liberty and justice for all. That’s not what happened in this episode. It’s not what happened to your dad. He was treated differently because of his faith.”
“It was shameful for us as senators,” he continued. “It was shameful for America.”
Mangi, an attorney at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler and a New Jersey resident, was nominated by President Joe Biden last November to be the first-ever Muslim to serve as a federal appellate judge anywhere in the country. Booker was one of the driving forces behind the nomination in the Senate.
But Mangi’s nomination quickly ran into severe headwinds on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Republicans grilled him over the course of two hearings on his connections to a controversial group at Rutgers University and his broader thoughts on Hamas and 9/11. Democrats cried foul, saying that the attacks reeked of Islamophobia – but then a handful of Democratic senators joined the Republican caucus in opposition to Mangi, imperiling his nomination in the closely divided Senate.
That opposition put Mangi into a limbo from which he never escaped; in the eleven months since he was approved by the Judiciary Committee in January, his nomination has lingered in the Senate with no vote. Booker insisted as recently as last month that he would continue fighting for Mangi to be approved, but chances of that have been slim for a long time.
And Biden’s decision not to withdraw Mangi from consideration and put forward an alternate nominee means that the Third Circuit seat to which he was nominated will instead get to be filled by incoming President Donald Trump. Had Mangi or another Biden-nominated judge been confirmed to replace Joseph Greenaway, a Barack Obama appointee, the court would have been evenly divided between the two parties’ nominees; with a Trump judge installed instead, the court, which has jurisdiction over Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, will tilt in Republicans’ favor instead.
On the Senate floor tonight, Booker quoted from a letter that Mangi himself wrote to Biden in which he spelled out the campaign that had been waged against him – a conservative group spent tens of thousands of dollars on ads telling senators to “vote no on antisemite Adeel Mangi” – and issued dire warnings for the nation.
“Our country faces an incoming tsunami of bigotry, hatred, and discrimination,” Mangi wrote. “It targets Muslims, Arabs, Jews, Black people, the LGBTQ+ community, and many others. And it always pretends to be something other than what it is. These forces are fueled not only by their proponents, but equally by the collaboration and silence of the spineless. They can be defeated only by those who lead voters with courage, not those who sacrifice principles for votes.”
Mangi added that he hopes the judicial nomination process is reformed for future would-be judges who are thinking of entering a life of public service.
“Who will give up the rewards of private sector success for public service, if the added price is character assassination and wading though a Senatorial swamp like this one?” Mangi wrote. “This process must be reinvented to protect nominees from threats both reputational and physical in an era of Congressional dishonor where disinformation reigns and all decency has been abandoned. I set forth this record of my experience and my opinions so that this playbook will be recognized the next time a Muslim is nominated to a prominent position of service.”
What neither Mangi’s letter nor Booker’s speech explicitly mentioned is that while Republicans led the charge against Mangi, it was Democratic senators like Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen who ultimately sank his nomination. Plenty of other Biden nominees faced unanimous Republican opposition; what was unusual in Mangi’s case was that some Democrats, too, weren’t on board.
Booker instead focused his speech on higher-minded ideals: that although the Senate may have failed Mangi, Mangi and his family have not stopped believing in America, and neither should anyone else.
“Your dad and your mom never faltered and never flinched, told the President of the United States that they would continue in the process if the president believed that it was still possible for him to serve his nation,” Booker told Mangi’s sons. “It’s these attributes of your parents that I know live in you… I want to ask you two to never stop believing in the ideals of this nation, because it is why your father is who he is.”
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Publish date : 2024-12-18 13:25:00
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