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'Insufferable Islamophobia': Senate Dems Could Help GOP Tank 1st Muslim Fed Appeals Judge
"A bipartisan coalition in the U.S. Senate is about to nix this judicial nominee because he's Muslim," one advocate said.
Mar 15, 2024
Progressive and Muslim rights organizations spoke out in support of federal appellate court nominee Adeel Mangi on Friday after news broke that enough U.S. Senate Democrats might vote with Republicans to scupper his appointment.
President Joe Biden nominated Mangi, a well-respected New York-based trial lawyer, to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit on November 15. If confirmed, he would be the first Muslim to serve as a federal appeals judge. However, CNN reported on Thursday that several Senate Democrats and their staff had told the White House that there seemed to be insufficient votes to confirm him.
The news followed a controversial hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in December, in which Mangi, who was born in Pakistan, was asked to comment on both the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. and Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel. While the committee voted to advance him along party lines, the outcome of a full Senate vote is now in question.
"Someone as qualified as Adeel Mangi should have broad and enthusiastic support from the whole Senate."
"A bipartisan coalition in the U.S. Senate is about to nix this judicial nominee because he's Muslim," Jameel Jaffer, the director of Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute, posted on social media in response to the news.
Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid said on social media that the move to vote against him was "insufferable Islamophobia and cowardice."
Rashid pointed out that seven of the judges nominated by former President Donald Trump were rated as "not qualified" by the American Bar Association (ABA), yet the Senate still voted to confirm them. Mangi, on the other hand, is "highly qualified" and "highly rated" and "instead even Senate Democrats are running away from him."
The ABA rates Mangi as "well-qualified," and Benchmark Litigation placed him on its 2024 and 2023 lists of the "Top 100 Trial Lawyers" in the country. He earned law degrees from both Oxford and Harvard and has had a successful career both representing corporate clients at the law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb, and Tyler and taking on pro bono cases.
One of his prominent pro bono victories involved Muslim communities who had been barred from building a mosque in two New Jersey towns. In another, he secured a settlement for the family of Karl Taylor, who died in a New York prison after being attacked by guards.
"Someone as qualified as Adeel Mangi should have broad and enthusiastic support from the whole Senate," People for the American Way posted in response to the CNN story. "Mangi has spent his career working pro bono for people who couldn't afford a lawyer and would be the first Muslim judge on the 3rd Circuit."
Muslim advocacy group Emgage Action urged the public to support Mangi's nomination and criticized the "overtly Islamophobic questioning" at his confirmation hearings.
"Call on your senators to swiftly move forward with his confirmation and advocate for Adeel Mangi's suitability for the federal bench!" the group said on social media.
One of the most vocal Republican opponents of Mangi's nomination is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Cruz was the one to ask him if he condemned "the atrocities of the Hamas terrorists," to which Mangi responded that the events of October 7 were "a horror." When Cruz then asked if he thought the attacks could be justified, Mangi answered, "I have no patience, none, for any attempts to justify or defend those events."
Cruz and other Republicans also questioned Mangi on his membership of the advisory board for the Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights, which they claimed supported antisemitism because of speakers it had hosted, as NorthJersey.com reported. In response, Mangi said the advisory board only met once annually and discussed the center's academic research, not its programming.
At the time, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats denounced the Republicans' line of questioning on social media.
"Senate Judiciary Republicans reached a new low, hurling unfounded accusations of antisemitism at an historic Muslim American judicial nominee today. In fact, Adeel Mangi is a longtime advocate for religious liberty," the Democratic committee members wrote.
Several Jewish American groups have backed Mangi's nomination, and even the Anti-Defamation League, which has been criticized for adopting an overly broad definition of antisemitism that stigmatizes legitimate criticisms of Israeli policies, defended him against the Republican line of questioning.
"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 toward his religion is profoundly wrong," the group wrote in a January statement.
In a social media post on Friday, Cruz seemed to steer his opposition to Mangi away from anything that could be construed as Islamophobic to instead paint him as a radical. Cruz shared a letter opposing his confirmation from the National Troopers Coalition over Mangi's role as an advisory board member of the Alliance of Families for Justice, which supports the family members of incarcerated individuals. However, the coalition argued Mangi's role on the board showed an anti-law enforcement bias.
"He is so far left that even some Democrats are opposing his nomination," Cruz wrote.
In response to the news that Democrats might vote against Mangi, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told CNN that the administration "continues to fight for his confirmation and to repudiate the vicious hate and bigotry with which he has been targeted because of his Muslim faith."
Bates called Mangi an "extraordinarily qualified nominee who is devoted to the rule of law, lived the American dream through hard work, proven his integrity, and would make history on the bench."
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Groups to Senate Dems: Subpoena Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo Now
"We must learn the full scope of these hidden efforts to improperly influence the Supreme Court and the extent of Justices Thomas' and Alito's ethical wrongdoings."
Nov 16, 2023
More than a dozen progressive advocacy groups on Thursday pressed Sen. Dick Durbin and other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to urgently subpoena Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, right-wing figures who have featured prominently in recent reporting on undisclosed gifts to U.S. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
"We must learn the full scope of these hidden efforts to improperly influence the Supreme Court and the extent of Justices Thomas' and Alito's ethical wrongdoings," Stand Up America, Indivisible, Demand Justice, and 11 other groups said.
"We encourage Chair Durbin and Judiciary Democrats to continue their efforts to subpoena Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, to shed light on any potential corruption on our nation's highest court, and we encourage the full Senate to pass a binding, enforceable code of ethics for all Supreme Court justices," they added.
"Billionaires, with demonstrated interests in influencing the court, making enormous secret gifts to justices, obviously merits investigation."
The statement comes a week after Durbin (Ill.) abruptly adjourned a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting during which members were expected to vote on subpoenas for Crow and Leo, both of whom have been accused of stonewalling the panel's investigation into Supreme Court corruption.
Durbin blamed "scheduling issues" for the surprise move and vowed to "continue to pursue subpoena authorization for Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo—two individuals who have refused to comply with this committee's oversight requests for months."
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the judiciary panel who is leading a Supreme Court ethics bill, said in a statement after the adjournment that "by putting up 90 amendments, Republicans jammed the gears of the committee."
"In an ordinary time, and with an ordinary Supreme Court, this would have been an uneventful day. Billionaires, with demonstrated interests in influencing the court, making enormous secret gifts to justices, obviously merits investigation," said Whitehouse. "We will still go forward, now that we have seen this strategy, with unified support on the Democratic side for getting to the bottom of what is going on with this pattern of secret billionaire gifts to justices."
Since April, the investigative outlet ProPublica has published several explosive stories detailing the luxury vacations and other gifts that Thomas and Alito have received from right-wing billionaires, including Crow and hedge fund mogul Paul Singer.
Leo, co-chair of the Federalist Society and a key architect of the Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority, attended and helped organize trips detailed in ProPublica's reporting, which sparked a full-blown ethics crisis at the high court and led the judicial body to adopt a code of conduct earlier this week.
Critics blasted the move as a "toothless PR stunt" that will do little to nothing to prevent wrongdoing, a message that the 14 progressive advocacy groups echoed in their joint statement on Thursday.
"The Supreme Court's new 'code of conduct,' which lacks an enforcement mechanism and was described by the court itself as 'not new,' only underscores the need for a thorough investigation and accounting of corruption on the high court," they argued.
An earlier version of this story misstated Leonard Leo's role at the Federalist Society. He is co-chair, not chair.
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Senate Democrats Demand Answers From Southwest About Holiday 'Meltdown'
"Southwest must take all necessary steps to ensure that this debacle never happens again," wrote the senators, who inquired about software, staffing, refunds, bags, wheelchairs, and executive and shareholder compensation.
Jan 13, 2023
A group of 15 U.S. senators on Thursday demanded answers from Southwest Airlines' CEO regarding the company's management of the disastrous 2022 holiday season, when thousands of travelers were stranded in airports amid nearly 16,000 flight cancelations.
"The mass flight cancellations at Southwest Airlines... during the last week of December ruined the holidays for tens of thousands of travelers, stranding them at gates without their bags and forcing them to miss celebrations with families and friends. Although winter storm Elliott disrupted flights across the country, every other airline operating in the United States managed to return to a regular flight schedule shortly thereafter—except Southwest," the senators wrote in a letter led by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) to company CEO Robert Jordan. "Southwest must take all necessary steps to ensure that this debacle never happens again."
"In total, Southwest canceled nearly 16,000 flights during this period. As you have rightfully acknowledged, Southwest simply failed its customers," wrote the lawmakers, who include 14 Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). "For consumers across the country, this failure was more than a headache—it was a nightmare."
\u201cNEW: Senators send letter to Southwest CEO Bob Jordan "demanding" answers for holiday meltdown. $LUV\u201d— Edward Russell (@Edward Russell) 1673622065
The letter continues:
Travelers were stranded across the country for days at a time, forced to spend hours on hold with Southwest customer service representatives or in line at Southwest service desks at the airport. Just as the storm set off a chain reaction of problems for Southwest, these cancellations inevitably led to bad consequences for travelers who could not return to their loved ones over the holidays, lacked access to critical medicine and other personal items in their misplaced bags, or were forced to miss days at work.
Your employees—flight attendants, pilots, ground workers, customer service representatives, dispatchers, ramp workers, and others—were also victims. Some found themselves stranded across the country. Others had to work mandatory overtime in frigid temperatures or spent countless hours seeking impossible-to-find solutions to help furious customers find their way home.
The senators noted that "based on initial comments from Southwest executives and news reports, the main cause of Southwest's meltdown appears to be legacy software that Southwest uses to coordinate its crews and planes."
"Yet, Southwest has long known that its software was outdated and the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association had warned that such a debacle was inevitable unless Southwest invested in new scheduling systems," the lawmakers wrote. "Instead of making those investments, Southwest distributed over $1.8 billion in dividends to its shareholders and bought back over $11 billion in its shares between 2011 and 2020. And just last month, Southwest announced that it would issue a $428 million dividend in the first quarter of this year—the first airline to announce a dividend since the start of the pandemic."
\u201c.@SouthwestAir\u2019s holiday meltdown was inexcusable. No business can treat its customers like that and get away with it. The passengers and the public need answers about what went wrong and how Southwest will make sure it never happens again.\nhttps://t.co/lvpnb6Xj4N\u201d— Ed Markey (@Ed Markey) 1673567578
To "better understand the causes of these cancellations and ensure a breakdown of this magnitude never happens again," the senators request answers to questions, including:
- Why Southwest was unable to return to a normal flight schedule after winter storm Elliott;
- Why Southwest's pilot and flight attendant scheduling software was unable to efficiently process cancellations;
- Why Southwest failed to modernize systems so they could effectively coordinate crew and flight schedules after major storms and during major travel periods;
- How and when Southwest plans to modernize its systems and what, if any, changes the company has made to its crew scheduling software system since the meltdown;
- How many Southwest employees worked overtime—and how many were forced to work overtime—between December 1 and January 2;
- How many passenger refunds the airline gave—and rejected—and whether passengers on canceled flights were reimbursed for hotels, meals, and alternative transportation;
- How many customers experienced delayed, damaged, or lost baggage and wheelchairs, and whether any passengers are still waiting for these items;
- When the decision was made to resume paying stock dividends, and whether other uses for the funds—like software updates or employee pay hikes—were considered; and
- Whether Southwest plans any stock buybacks for 2023, and if so, would they be tied to company performance.
Southwest sparked further outrage this week by announcing the promotions of several company executives, a move that Liz Zelnick, director of the Economic Security and Corporate Power program at Accountable.US, called indicative of "the behavior of a company with no intention of changing course from management decisions that seek to enrich shareholders while leaving consumers holding the bag."
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