It Looks Like It's Over For Biden's Historic Muslim Court Pick, Adeel Mangi

WASHINGTON — It looks like it’s over for Adeel Mangi, President Joe Biden’s court pick.

Two Democrats say they’ll oppose his nomination, making the math next to impossible for Mangi to get confirmed given Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the Senate. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) announced her opposition Tuesday, and an aide to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) confirmed to HuffPost on Thursday that he’s a “no” vote.

Mangi, a 23-year civil litigator with a unanimously well-qualified rating by the American Bar Association, was on track to become the nation’s first Muslim U.S. appeals court judge. But now, his nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit appears to be going down because of an ugly and baseless smear campaign aimed at casting Mangi as an antisemitic terrorist sympathizer.

GOP senators and dark money groups, including Judicial Crisis Network, have spent months spreading lies and distortions about Mangi’s record and character.

During his December confirmation hearing, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) were appalling in their treatment of Mangi. They berated him and repeatedly distorted his record. They demanded that he share his personal views on the 9/11 terrorist attacks, last year’s Oct. 7 attack against Israel, and the Israel-Hamas conflict. Mangi repeatedly disavowed all forms of terrorism.

Their treatment of Mangi was so offensive that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, publicly denounced them afterward. So did the Anti-Defamation League , the leading national group focused on combating antisemitism. And so did more than a dozen prominent Jewish groups.

That didn’t stop Judicial Crisis