U.S. President Joe Biden’s pick for a seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals appeared to be in jeopardy on Thursday after a third Democratic senator said that she would vote against his nomination.
Adeel Mangi, a partner at Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, would be the first Muslim-American federal appellate judge. However, his confirmation has faced heated opposition over his advisory board memberships at a pair of controversial legal advocacy groups, including a Rutgers University center that one Republican senator called a “mouthpiece for Hamas.”
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Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, a group that opposes Mangi’s nomination, laid out the case for why Mangi’s associations were disqualifying.
“Mangi recently served on the advisory board of a shadowy Rutgers law-school group called the Center for Security, Race and Rights,” Davis told JNS. “This group held events featuring pro-Islamist, anti-Israel propaganda and brought in anti-Israel speakers, including Sami Al-Arian, a former professor and convicted felon who pleaded guilty in federal courts to funding the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”
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“That, to me, proves that Mangi has horrific judgments that he would be associated in a leadership role with this group,” Davis said.
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Despite the opposition to Mangi, Schumer could try to engineer a majority by holding a vote when some Republican senators are out of town. But the political consequences of trying to ram through a nominee in that fashion would be disastrous, said Davis, former chief counsel for nominations to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), then the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman.
“The majority leader controls the calendar, and technically Schumer could try to do that, but it would create a nuclear winter in the Senate if they tried to jam that through,” Davis told JNS.
The regular business of the Senate relies on unanimous consent agreements that waive procedural requirements and prevent lengthy, arcane votes on routine motions. Davis said that if Schumer were to pursue the nuclear option, those consent agreements would disappear.
“Any senator could grind the Senate to a halt because you have to operate by unanimous consent so much,” he said.
Davis also seriously doubts that any centrist Republicans, like Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) or Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), would consider voting for Mangi.
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Davis noted that groups that oppose Biden’s judicial nominations have to be strategic about the battles they pick, given Democratic control of the Senate. Mangi was a particularly poor nominee for the moment, he said.
“At the Article III Project, we have not opposed that many of President Biden’s judicial nominees. We obviously don’t support them, but we have not led an active campaign to oppose very many of them,” he said. “It’s gonna be hard to stop almost all of these judicial nominees, so we have intentionally saved our fire for the worst ones who have the most realistic shot of going down.”
“The timing could not be worse for this nomination after Oct. 7,” he added.
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