The Judge We Could Have Had

“Our country faces an incoming tsunami of bigotry, hatred, and discrimination. It targets Muslims, Arabs, Jews, Black people, the LGBTQ+ community, and many others,” nominee to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals Adeel Mangi wrote to the White House. “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 chose to speak truth to power. His nomination to be a federal appellate judge fizzled, not because he wasn’t well-qualified for the role, but because the ugly politics of the era we live in intervened.

We all understand politics play a role in judicial selection. Federal judges get there by being appointed by a president from one party or another. But Mangi was immaculately qualified for the position. He was nominated by President Biden on November 15, 2023, with plenty of time on the clock. A partner at a New York law firm, Mangi would have been the first Muslim to serve on a federal appellate court. He was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and has law degrees from both Oxford and Harvard. In addition to spending 23 years in practice, with an impressive depth of appellate experience in both state and federal courts, he devoted time to pro bono civil rights cases.

So how did his confirmation process go? The vitriol he faced seemed destined to shut it down almost from the beginning. There were insinuations that he was antisemitic and anti-Israel, that he was pro-Hamas. Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, dismissed the attacks, saying there was no basis for them. While the bulk of them came from Republicans, three Democratic Senators said they would not vote for Mangi.

Mangi wrote to the White House after Senate Democrats, pragmatically accepting the reality they faced, agreed to drop consideration of four Circuit Court nominees who did not have the votes for confirmation in exchange for agreement from Republicans to opt out of using procedural roadblocks that could have blocked confirmation of Biden’s remaining nominees for district court judgeships. That means Democrats will confirm more judges during Joe Biden’s tenure than Republicans did during Trump’s first administration, and that’s important, perhaps even the only path forward through a bad situation. It is good news that those judges will be confirmed. But it doesn’t make the treatment of Mangi any more palatable.

In the letter he wrote to the White House, after it was clear his confirmation prospects were over, Mangi explained it clearly, “This unfortunate fact remains: We have a fundamentally broken process for choosing federal judges. This is no longer a system for evaluating fitness for judicial office. It is now a channel for the raising of money based on performative McCarthyism before video cameras, and for the dissemination of dark-money-funded attacks that especially target minorities.” It was true for Mangi, and it has been true for many others whose nominations stalled, despite excellent qualifications.

Mangi’s nomination has been pending for over a year. The Third Circuit, which covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands, currently has seven judges appointed by Republicans and six appointed by Democrats. In addition to being historic, Mangi’s confirmation would have kept an equal balance on the court. The seat he would have occupied is now open for Donald Trump to fill.

I do not know Mr. Mangi personally and do not know the truth of the allegations made against him, but there is no conceivable reason for Senator Durbin to lie. Even the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, came to his defense. They wrote back in January, “Just as associating Jewish Americans with certain views or beliefs regarding Israeli government actions would be deemed antisemitic, berating the first American Muslim federal appellate judicial nominee with endless questions that appear to have been motivated by bias towards his religion is profoundly wrong.”

Diversity may have become a dirty word in conservative circles, but we are all better off when the judiciary reflects the communities it serves, not just certain privileged interests. Judge Mangi should have been the first of many. Shame on all of us that he will not be.

Whoever said we must all hang together or we will all hang separately foresaw 2025 America clearly. In 2010, as the U.S. Attorney in North Alabama, I began taking teams from my office to meet with Muslim community members across our district at their Mosques. No U.S. Attorney in my district had visited them before, and despite the fraught environment after 9-11, we made it clear we were there to talk with them about their civil rights and our obligation to protect them, not terrorism. All too frequently, they had been subject to harassment and threats.

I wondered, initially, how they would respond to a Jewish woman in my role. The answer was warmly, earnestly, and with a commitment to learning about each other. The friendships we developed beyond work were sustaining. I enjoyed a feast at the Birmingham mosque several years later after the birth of a community elder’s first grandchild. I was there repeatedly for Eid. But just as often, we met to discuss issues and concerns for no reason other than to share time together, and although some of the members of my team were wary at first, as one of them shared during a visit to the Mosque in Gadsden, Alabama, it was a moving experience to understand that we had far more in common than he might have expected, that everyone wanted to make a good life for their children and enjoy the promise of America, that we were far more alike than we were different.

I find that is true, whether we are talking about Muslim people, the LGBTQ+ community, Black people, white people, Jews, Catholics, Sikhs, immigrants or any other distinctive community of Americans. Republicans have all too often and all too successfully driven wedges between us. We must find a path past our differences, or Trump will use them to divide and conquer, as conservatives did with Mangi’s nomination. We all lose when that happens.

You can read Mangi’s full letter here.

We’re in this together,

Joyce