When the Senate emerges from recess next week, it will return to a stack of unworthy judicial nominees, some with pending committee votes, others awaiting their floor vote.
I have explored the worst of them in Third Circuit nominee Adeel Mangi, whose extremist affiliations unleashed a torrent of opposition from law enforcement organizations and others that stand against terrorism and antisemitism. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gave five floor speeches opposing Mangi, most recently calling out the other side in blunt terms: “Our colleagues may not mind Mr. Mangi’s cavorting with apologists for terrorism and cop-killing. That much wouldn’t be surprising considering that their Party is in the process of succumbing to noxious strains of anti-Semitism and soft-on-crime radicalism.” Senator John Kennedy said on the floor that “I’ve never gotten so many letters or phone calls from law enforcement, supporting or opposing—in this case opposing—a nomination.” (I excerpted several of the opposition letters here.) But a number of Senate Democrats and the White House have been pushing back, making the unfounded charge that the opposition to Mangi was based on his Muslim faith.
Mangi has denied awareness of the extremism of the left-wing groups in question, though he served on their boards, supported at least one of them financially, and was intimately involved with a panel he moderated which was co-sponsored by a terrorism-linked group (a detail that Mangi conveniently omitted from his questionnaire). Their radicalism has been so alarming and obvious that, as the Washington Free Beacon editorialized, the nominee “is either dishonest or stunningly oblivious” in his denials. Three Democrats have so far expressed their opposition to Mangi—Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who recently made news by announcing that going forward, he would vote against nominees that lack any Republican support. While the Biden White House seems unphased by this nominee’s extremist ties, the nomination appears to be going nowhere, despite Judiciary Committee Democrats’ decision to report it to the floor.
Republican senators should also stand united against Nancy Maldonado, a sitting district judge and dark-money favorite who has been nominated to the Seventh Circuit. During her March 20 nomination hearing, Senator Kennedy brought up an amicus brief she signed that argued “assault weapons may be banned because they’re extraordinarily dangerous and are not appropriate for legitimate self-defense purposes.” He asked her what she meant by “assault weapons.” Unable to answer, she sheepishly said she did not write the brief and was just local counsel in the case. She eventually fessed up and said, “I am not a gun expert.” On top of that, Maldonado has the worst backlog of overdue motions in the Seventh Circuit and one of the worst among district judges nationwide.
Appearing at the same hearing was Sparkle Sooknanan, a nominee to the District Court for the District of Columbia. Senator Kennedy asked her about the representation of the Pennsylvania GOP by her former law firm, Jones Day, during the 2020 election, and whether she had said, “This lawsuit was brought for no other reason than to deprive poor people of the right to vote.” She was a partner at the firm at the time and replied, “Senator, those were not my words.” Yet a New York Times Magazine article published in August 2022 and adapted from a forthcoming book reported that Sooknanan made that precise statement on a call in mid-November 2020.
When probed by Senator Josh Hawley about why Sooknanan left Jones Day, she refused to admit it was over its 2020 election representation, which effectively aided President Trump’s re-election effort. Another issue that has come up is her work while at Jones Day for hedge funds during Puerto Rico’s debt crisis in 2017. Representative Nydia Velazquez, a liberal member from New York, recently posted the following on X: “As a lawyer, Sparkle Sooknanan worked for multiple hedge funds that were squeezing money from Puerto Rico during its’ [sic] debt crisis. Her nomination to the D.C. District Court is an insult to the people of Puerto Rico.”
Amir Ali, also nominated to the District Court for the District of Columbia, was reported out of committee on a party-line vote. As I discussed in February, Ali has headed the anti-police MacArthur Justice Center and has been another form of payback to the Left’s chronically soft-on-crime dark-money organizations. First Circuit nominee Seth Aframe, who was reported out on a party-line vote at the same markup as Mangi (on January 18), is a prosecutor with a track record of requesting lenient sentences in cases involving the rape of minors and child pornography.
Still another nominee who squeaked by in committee at the January markup is Mustafa Kasubhai, a magistrate judge nominated to the District of Oregon. Besides having his own record of leniency in cases involving violent crimes against children, he has a history of past writings that inferred Marxism, over which Senator Ted Cruz grilled him during his nomination hearing. Kasubhai also wrote an opinion against curfews during the riots of 2020, which included the firebombing of a federal courthouse in Portland, and he refused during his hearing to describe the violence that destroyed part of downtown Eugene, Oregon, as a riot. He was also asked by Senators Cruz and Mike Lee about a presentation he gave to the Oregon State Bar where he said that “DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—is the heart and soul of the court system. Can we say that? Yeah, I just did and I say it proudly.” He also requires those who appear in his court to announce their pronouns.
Each of these nominees poses a unique threat to our federal judicial system, and Senator Manchin’s new posture toward judicial nominations is a big step in the right direction of preventing their respective confirmations. Republicans in the full Senate must present a united front, as they have in committee, so that these unworthy judicial nominees are not confirmed.