WASHINGTON — In the entirety of Joe Biden’s presidency, there is perhaps no judicial nominee who endured more partisan ugliness and unwarranted hostility than Adeel Mangi, the president’s pick for a U.S. appeals court seat.
Biden tapped Mangi, a veteran civil litigator in New Jersey, for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in June 2023.
Mangi checks all the boxes for a solid judicial candidate. He was unanimously rated “well qualified” by the American Bar Association. He was hailed for his legal and pro bono work by groups including the AFL-CIO and the Coalition of the Underrepresented Law Enforcement Associations, as well as more than a dozen Jewish groups.
Mangi also happens to be Muslim. If he had been confirmed, he would have been the first-ever Muslim U.S. appeals court judge in the country. He also would have tipped the ideological balance of this appeals court, giving it an even mix of Democrat- and GOP-appointed judges.
But from the start of Mangi’s process, Republican senators and dark money groups subjected him to a monthslong, disgusting smear campaign. They baselessly tried to cast him as an antisemitic terrorist sympathizer. When that didn’t seem to stick — which was partly because Jewish groups lined up in strong defense of Mangi — the GOP pivoted to a new line of attack: baselessly trying to cast him as someone who supports cop killers.
Their attacks on Mangi got so intense they scared off a handful of Democratic senators from supporting him as they eyed their reelection campaigns. Mangi’s nomination limped along in the Senate until last month, when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) cut a deal with Republicans to expedite votes on nine of Biden’s district court nominees in exchange for not voting on any of Biden’s four appeals court nominees.
After everything he’s endured, Mangi’s nomination is over. He never even got a Senate vote.
In a Monday letter to Biden, Mangi offered a rare and sobering take on why his federal judicial nomination process went the way it did — and why he never got a fair shot.
“This unfortunate fact remains: We have a fundamentally broken process for choosing federal judges,” Mangi wrote. “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. Nominees pay the price — and so too does our nation.”
He warned that the brutal process he went through will likely cause other qualified people to think twice about giving up lucrative jobs to take a chance at becoming a federal judge.
“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 asked. “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.”
He added, “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.”
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Below is a copy of Mangi’s letter to Biden.