Muslim Lawyers Recoil at GOP Attacks on Historic Court Pick (1)

Adeel Mangi’s historic federal appellate court nomination started out as a celebratory moment for fellow Muslim lawyers—but, for them, it has now become a familiar spectacle.

Conservatives argue the Pakistani-born Mangi shouldn’t be confirmed to a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit because he appears to harbor sympathies for extremists.

Dismayed Muslims in the legal community who are closely watching say the accusations against Mangi reinforce the idea that they favor radicalism.

“The burden of having to defend against stereotypes that are out in the world is omnipresent,” said Shirin Sinnar, a Stanford University law professor who writes about national security, hate crimes, and terrorism.

Republicans point to Mangi’s association with a Rutgers Law School center they say has platformed pro-terrorism and antisemitic material about the Israel-Hamas war and 9/11. Critics also cite Mangi’s connection to a criminal justice non-profit co-founded by a woman convicted in a notorious 1981 Brink’s armored truck robbery that resulted in two police killings.

Mangi has decried the “baseless accusations” and said crimes against law enforcement are “horrific and indefensible.” Still, it’s unclear whether he has enough support in the Democratic-controlled Senate to be confirmed.

The campaign against Mangi’s appointment comes at an opportune time for conservatives seeking to topple President Joe Biden and retake the Senate. The Israel-Hamas war and alleged antisemitism on college campuses has already helped them score political victories, including the resignations of two Ivy League presidents.

It also comes after reports of “anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias,” including alleged hate crimes, spiked in the first month of the Israel-Hamas war.

For Mangi and other Muslim Americans, “your identity and your well-being is always susceptible to what is happening internationally, specifically in the region that I’ll call for brevity the Middle East,” Khaled Beydoun, an Arizona State University law professor whose work examines constitutional law, critical race theory, and terrorism, said.

Aggressive Attacks

Biden has prioritized diversity in making judicial picks, and Republicans have denounced many of his selections as radicals.

The attacks on Mangi have been especially aggressive, Muslim lawyers and other supporters of the nomination say.

The GOP lines of questioning at Mangi’s Dec. 13 Senate Judiciary confirmation hearing were “particularly vicious,” Hanna Chandoo, a partner at Hadsell Stormer Renick & Dai LLP and a member of the American Muslim Bar Association’s board of directors said, adding it “will undoubtedly result in a less diverse bench.”

The White House calls the opposition to Mangi a “cruel, Islamophobic, smear campaign” and stresses support for him from outside groups, including former law enforcement leaders from New Jersey who cite his integrity and “sense of fairness.” Senate Judiciary Chairman Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) characterized the treatment of Mangi by committee Republicans as a “new low” for the panel.

Republicans and conservative legal groups have focused their opposition in Washington and with digital ads in the home states of vulnerable Senate Democrats ahead of the November elections. They’ve cast the Oxford and Harvard-educated corporate lawyer, nominated several weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, as an ally of terrorists and cop killers.

“Mr. Mangi is not qualified to be a federal judge because he supports organizations that celebrate people who kill law enforcement officers. He supports organizations that hate Americans, and he supports organizations that hate Jews,” Senate Judiciary Committee member John Kennedy (R-La.) said during floor remarks on March 21.

In an ad launched by the Judicial Crisis Network targeting Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), images of Mangi are spliced with footage of a plane hitting the World Trade Center. “President Joe Biden wants to remake the courts with the most extreme judges he can find, but Adeel Mangi might be the worst of all,” a narrator warns.

An op-ed in the Washington Times arguing against Mangi’s nomination includes a graphic with a Hamas flag transposed over the Pakistani lawyer’s face.

Mangi has repeatedly spoken to his limited role at the Rutgers center and repudiated the 9/11 and Hamas attacks.

“Whether motivated by attempts to portray my religion as violent, or any other goal, any suggestion that I have sympathy for attacks on law enforcement is shocking and false,” Mangi said of complaints of his ties to the criminal justice non-profit Alliance of Families for Justice.

The attacks seem to be working. At least three Democratic senators have indicated they won’t support Mangi if his nomination comes up for a confirmation vote. That’s more than enough to sink the bid if no Republicans support it.

Painful Reminders

As Mangi told senators at his confirmation hearing about “his city” being attacked while a junior associate at his law firm during 9/11, real estate lawyer Umar Sheikh said the exchange evoked a painful memory of being discriminated against for the first time in the immediate months following the Al-Qaeda attacks.

A judge told him that, as a Muslim American, he should be ashamed for bringing a lawsuit involving a real estate dispute close to ground zero,” Sheikh said.

“You’re feeling two things after 9/11. You’re feeling a deep sorrow for the country that you love, and then you’ve got to fend off attacks from people that believe you don’t love it enough, not because of what you did or didn’t do but because of who you pray to,” said Sheikh, who’s now a department chair and a member of Offit Kurman’s real estate law and transactions group.

Prospective Muslim judges must clear a high bar as they’re being considered for the courts and “demonstrate to the audience vetting him that he is somebody who is palatable enough, American enough, and not Muslim enough to be threatening as a judge on the federal bench,” Beydoun said.

That dynamic came through as Senate Republicans invoked their support of Zahid Quraishi, the son of Pakistani immigrants who was twice deployed to Iraq after 9/11, as a defense against allegations that their Mangi opposition was charged by Islamophobia. He was confirmed to New Jersey’s US district court in 2021 by a 81-6 vote.

Quraishi, whose nomination got mixed reception among the Muslim legal community at the time, had a more conservative record of government and military service that appealed to Republicans.

“It’s as convincing as saying ‘I’m not a racist, I have a Black friend,’ or ‘I’m not a misogynist, I have a daughter,” John P. Collins, a George Washington University law professor who studies judicial nominations, said of the Republican defense. “It’s 100% bad faith, and 100% dog whistling.”

Judicial Diversity

Regardless of whether Mangi gets confirmed, Muslim lawyers and others who aspire to positions of prominence in the government will remember how he was treated, Sinnar said.

“People don’t forget the experience of seeing people from within their community rise in prominence and then be attacked for their identity,” she said.

For Muslim Americans, “it’s kind of a lesson that’s reinforced every time someone is in that position, rather than just by a single episode,” she added.

The opposition campaign already has had a chilling effect on Muslim lawyers. Sheikh said that it had discouraged a close friend of his from applying for a public service role.

“Sometimes you think that that disheartening feeling that you’re getting is on purpose, that that’s how you’re supposed to feel,” he said. “People of color, immigrants, people from different backgrounds—they’re supposed to feel discouraged from trying to take these positions.”