NEW: [Biden Third Circuit nominee] Adeel Mangi's letter to America.

[In It to Win It]

LawDork

Letter: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/790ef825561421c3/92cdcf4b-full.pdf

On Monday, 13 months after President Joe Biden announced that Adeel Mangi would be his nominee for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Mangi issued a searing indictment of a system that has left him as the longest-pending appellate nominee in the nation.

“I have battled for justice, even if it meant there would be none for me,“ Mangi wrote in the letter, acknowledging there is “no pathway to confirmation” at this point.

Later, he summed up his four-page letter — which, bless him, included many links — with a damning, direct assessment, writing:

[W]e have a fundamentally broken process for choosing federal judges. 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.

Mangi would have been the nation’s first Muslim American federal appeals court judge, and the attacks against him never stopped. After Republicans questioned him at his confirmation hearing largely with anti-Muslim guilt-by-association attacks, the opposition later expanded to include baseless claims of terrorism and anti-law enforcement connections.

Then, three Democrats — Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia — announced earlier this year that they would not support Mangi’s nomination. As I wrote at the time, their opposition “is appalling cowardice, and they should be ashamed.”

https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3ldhhd32hyk2a