The Allegory of Would-Be Federal Judge Adeel Mangi

Democratic politicians treated Republicans’ unabashedly bigoted opposition to Mangi as serious, sincere objections to his qualifications, compromising on their putative values in a vain effort to appease opponents who are interested only in their surrender. And by simultaneously embracing cynical law-and-order narratives that cast criminal defense attorneys as unworthy to serve as judges, Democrats reinforced the legal system’s well-earned reputation for treating the wealthy and powerful as deserving of its protections, and everyone else as interlopers who are to be disposed of as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The story begins shortly after Biden nominated Mangi in November 2023, when conservative activists, eager to scuttle any Democratic judicial pick by any means necessary, launched an egregious smear campaign against Mangi, insinuating that his service on the advisory board of a Rutgers-affiliated religious freedom center makes him an antisemite, a terrorist sympathizer, or some vile combination of the two. During his Senate confirmation hearing — formal opportunities for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to question nominees about their backgrounds and philosophies — Republican senators harangued Mangi to share his personal views about whether there was any ​“justification” for the October 7 attacks and treated his repeated denials as invitations to ask again, albeit in a slightly different format.

At one point, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-LA) asked Mangi, ​“Is this the way you celebrate 9/11?” — about as loaded and racist as a loaded, racist question can get.

Last spring, three Senate Democrats announced they would not vote to confirm him. Then, in November 2024, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) struck a deal with Republicans on Biden’s remaining judicial nominees that reduced Mangi’s already-slim chances of confirmation to zero. The deal means that Trump will probably fill the seat—which should have been filled by a Biden pick — with another conservative legal movement dead-ender who concedes that racism is theoretically bad, but does not want to be so bold as to express approval of Brown v. Board of Education in public.

During Trump’s first four years in the White House, he appointed 234 life-tenured judges, including 54 to the powerful federal courts of appeals — just one fewer than the 55 appeals court judges that President Barack Obama was able to appoint in twice as many years in office. If Trump serves his upcoming term in full, by the time it’s over, he will likely have appointed half of all federal judges, and perhaps a majority of the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet even after the 2024 election, when Democrats had nothing to lose by making one last push to confirm Mangi before they lose power for the foreseeable future, they decided to forfeit the vacancy instead.

In the days after Mangi’s confirmation hearing, Democrats appeared to rally around him: Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), for example, criticized Republicans for stooping to a ​“new low,” and a White House spokesperson called the attacks ​“hateful and undignified.” Outside the party, a major Muslim civil rights group condemned the spectacle as ​“Islamophobic and un-American.” More than a dozen Jewish organizations echoed this sentiment, publishing a combined letter that defended Mangi against charges of antisemitism and praised him as a person of ​“strength and good deeds.”

But conservative activists were undeterred and ran TV ads urging Senate Democrats in tough reelection fights not to give ​“antisemite Adeel Mangi a lifetime position on our courts.” Around the same time, conservatives began working another angle, leveraging the bipartisan allegiance to dog-whistle law-and-order politics to fearmonger about the people and interests Mangi would ostensibly represent as a federal judge.

Several years before his nomination, Mangi worked with the Alliance of Families for Justice (AFJ), an anti-mass incarceration nonprofit that provides legal services to incarcerated people and support services to their families, to represent the family of a mentally ill man killed by a corrections officer; later, Mangi agreed to join the organization’s board. Separately, AFJ has pushed for the compassionate release of the incarcerated activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, and sponsored a fellowship named for the late Kathy Boudin, a criminal justice reformer who spent 22 years in prison for murder before her release in 2003. This is all a conservative media outlet needed to supplement the anti-Muslim campaign against Mangi, breathlessly framing tenuous connections between his professional experience and people convicted of crimes as evidence of his affiliation with ​“a left-wing group with extensive ties to convicted cop killers.”

Incredibly, this worked: In March, Nevada Democrat Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto announced she would oppose Mangi, citing his links to ​“an organization that I have found has connections to individuals who killed police officers.” Nevada’s other Democratic senator, Jacky Rosen, followed suit, due to ​“concerns” that she’d purportedly ​“heard from law enforcement” in the state. Meanwhile, West Virginia’s then-Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin had said he would not vote to confirm any nominee who did not have the support of at least one Republican. In a Senate that has been controlled by a 51-member Democratic majority, just two defections would have been enough to kill a nomination as long as Republicans hold the line — which, given the cover afforded to them by three Democrats’ credulous defections, was an easy lift.

Some Democrats had gestured at salvaging the nomination: Durbin, for example, urged his colleagues not to fall for such ​“baseless” and ​“outrageous” attacks. But after these appeals failed to persuade anyone, Republican or Democrat, to change their minds, Democratic leadership appeared to more or less drop the matter. (Although Judiciary Committee Democrats advanced Mangi’s nomination out of committee along party lines, it remained in limbo for the better part of a year.) Not until November 2024 did the fate of his nomination become clear: Under the terms of the deal Schumer made, Senate Republicans agreed not to slow the confirmations of certain district court nominees, and in return, Democrats would stand down on the four remaining appeals court nominees, including Mangi.

Even at the end of a four-year term — during which Senate Democrats managed to confirm 235 federal judges, just edging out Trump’s first-term total of 234 — this is a devastating example of scoring an own-goal. Democrats not only traded more powerful appeals court seats for less powerful district court seats; had they confirmed Mangi, they also would have evened out the partisan composition of the Third Circuit, which has seven Republican-appointed judges, six Democratic-appointed judges, and one vacancy. Because they didn’t, when the incoming Republican Senate majority fills the seat next year, they will shift the court’s balance of power further to the right.

After news of the deal broke, Schumer explained that Democrats didn’t have the votes to confirm these nominees, and that he was making the difficult but prudent choice to take what he could get. But this is an oversimplification at best: Confirming a judge requires only a majority of senators on the floor, and until that point, Schumer had carefully scheduled votes for times when conspicuous Republican absences—including Ohio Sen. and Vice President-elect JD Vance — allowed Democrats to pull nominees across the finish line, sometimes in a marathon series of late-night votes. 

By making this deal, Schumer essentially agreed to stop trying — a tacit judgment that Senate Democrats had done enough on judges and should not spend the last few weeks staying late at the office for an uncertain payoff.

Even if Schumer was right — if there was no window of time in December when Mangi would have had the numbers — there also would have been no cost to trying to advance his nomination to a vote anyway, forcing the Democrats abandoning Mangi to at least have the courage to put their names to it. A few of Schumer’s colleagues expressed polite-but-public annoyance about this preemptive surrender: Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono, for example, issued a statement making clear that she was ​“prepared to stay in session as long as it takes — nights, weekends, or whatever else necessary — to confirm every outstanding nominee.” By declaring Mangi unconfirmable under any circumstances, Schumer ensured that no wobbly Democrat would pay a price for their spinelessness.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Democrats’ treatment of Mangi is the mundanity of his résumé. To its credit, the Biden White House worked to diversify a judiciary long dominated by law firm partners and former prosecutors: Overall, some 40% of its nominees are public defenders, labor lawyers, civil rights attorneys and other lawyers with backgrounds underrepresented on the bench. And for the most part, Senate Democrats ignored predictable efforts to tar these nominees as soft on crime or secret Marxists. Their confirmations ensure that for years to come, more criminal defendants and individual plaintiffs will appear before federal judges who understand the power disparities they face.

Mangi, impressive though his academic credentials and pro bono experience might be, is none of these things. He has spent his career in private practice, working on behalf of corporations that already wield more than enough power in the legal system. There was no ideological reason for Republicans to oppose his confirmation. There is only his race and religion — Mangi would have been this country’s first-ever Muslim American federal appeals court judge — because Republicans understand that in this country, the easiest way to splinter a fragile center-left coalition is to spew fear-mongering horseshit about brown people and count on a few handwringing Democrats to crack.

With no remaining pathways to confirmation, on Dec. 16, 2024, Mangi wrote a letter to the White House that excoriated Senate Republicans for their rank Islamophobia and Senate Democrats for their embarrassing cowardice. The Democrats who opposed his confirmation, he said, either ​“lack the wisdom to discern the truth, which exposes a catastrophic lack of judgment; or they used my nomination to court conservative voters in an election year, which exposes a catastrophic lack of principle.” He also criticized Democratic leadership for disposing of his nomination by making a deal that glossed over the bigotry that infused his confirmation experience: ​“My family and I were put through this astonishing prolonged process and yet in the end denied even a vote requiring Senators to show who they are,” Mangi wrote. ​“The strength of the Senate’s collective commitment to principle stands revealed.”

Mangi’s letter is a righteous, clear-eyed indictment of the Democratic establishment not only for failing him, but also for making clear to their Republican counterparts that the right-wing playbook for defeating nominees of color remains as dependable as ever. It is an infuriating injustice that the strongest statement in support of Mangi throughout this entire debacle had to come from Mangi himself, and only after it was too late to matter. ​“I entered this nomination process as a proud American and a proud Muslim,” he wrote. ​“I exit it the same way, unbowed.”

Adeel Mangi deserved better from everyone involved: from the White House, which was evidently unprepared for the attacks on Mangi and unable to effectively defend him from them; from his Senate Democratic opponents, who would rather hand a life-tenured appeals court seat to Trump than confirm the victim of a bad-faith smear campaign; and even from his Senate Democratic supporters, who would rather shield their colleagues from the possibility of criticism than force them to take a mildly uncomfortable vote.

Accomplishing meaningful things in politics usually entails a fight. As they so often do, Democrats simply walked away from this one.