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President Joe Biden has nominated Adeel Mangi to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in the latest example of his effort to diversify the federal judiciary. If confirmed, Mangi would be the first Muslim American federal appellate judge. Republicans have attempted to smear him as an antisemitic terrorist sympathizer — a charge as baseless as it is unsurprising, considering its source.
But the tactic has reportedly caused enough Senate Democrats to potentially wobble that the nomination may be in jeopardy. If Democrats cave, they’ll be rewarding an Islamophobic right-wing pressure campaign backed by the Judicial Crisis Network, the Leonard Leo-linked group led by a former Clarence Thomas clerk that works to confirm Republican judges and block Democratic ones.
At his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in December, Republicans harped on Mangi’s limited role on an advisory board for an anti-Islamophobia center at Rutgers University. His role there from 2019 to 2023 was advising on academic research at an annual meeting, but senators questioned him about the center's speakers and an event that he said he was not even aware of. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, pressed Mangi on whether he condemned the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel — something not usually demanded of your run-of-the-mill judicial nominee. And even after he did so, thoroughly, Republican senators voted against him, with Mangi only making it through the Democratic-led committee on a party-line vote.
Presumably, the Anti-Defamation League would be the first to condemn any antisemitism at play. The reason the group didn’t do so here is because there wasn’t any. Indeed, the ADL even spoke out against what it called the “inappropriate and prejudicial treatment” of Mangi that amounted to “an attempt to create controversy where one did not exist.” That’s an inconvenient fact for the nominee’s Republican attackers, and one that will make it all the more pathetic if Democrats help the GOP win this dirty campaign.
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