LOL Democrats: Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

[goofy]

https://twitter.com/burgessev/status/1770572049867554914

This basically makes him a Republican now, right? Like confirming judges is the only thing Dems can do with the Senate without the House, so he might as well just switch parties.

[commonWealth]

Mitch McConnell: We are the party of no!

15 years of obstructionism later…

Manchin: Listen, if you can’t get even one Republican vote, I’m a no.

[BriansHat]

Sounds like he’s a Republican then

[d10]

Always has been.gif

[akm]

Doesn’t really matter since we are in a presidential election window so any judicial noms should wait to reflect the will of the voters.

Presidential election windows run from 2 years prior to 2 years post election just to be safe (when there is a sitting Democrat president).

[goofy]

@goofy

Jay Willis is the only good legal journalist

Democrats’ Abandonment of Adeel Mangi Is Cynical and Embarrassing

For the past few months, Adeel Mangi, a law firm partner nominated by President Joe Biden to a vacant federal appeals court seat, has been the subject of one of the most unhinged right-wing smear campaigns in recent memory. Given how integral unhinged right-wing smear campaigns are to modern Republican Party politics, this is a high bar. I assure you that the conservative movement’s treatment of Mangi, who would be the first Muslim American federal appeals court judge if confirmed, comfortably clears it.

Back in February, a right-wing advocacy group began running ads that spliced images of Mangi’s face with, among other things, video clips from Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel and footage of a plane hitting the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. An ominous-sounding voiceover warns viewers that Mangi is an “antisemite” who, at his confirmation hearings, “refused to condemn” terrorism and other “hateful views.”

The factual basis for this claim—a term I use in the loosest possible sense—is Mangi’s prior service on the advisory board of the Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights, an organization founded after September 11 to “address the underlying structural and systemic causes of Islamophobia and xenophobia.” In 2021, the Center hosted a panel that included (gasp!) speakers critical of Israel; Mangi, whose duties with the Center were limited to participation in annual meetings regarding research into federal antidiscrimination laws, did not know about or attend it. However, at Mangi’s confirmation hearing, Republican senators used this as a pretext to ask the nominee—who is, again, a law firm partner—to outline in excruciating detail his personal views on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Louisiana Senator John Kennedy briefly shelved his bar exam trivia shtick to ask Mangi if he “celebrate[s]” 9/11, hoping to generate breathless National Review headlines that placed “Mangi” and “Hamas” as within a few words of each other.

In an ideal world, the people in charge of confirming federal judges would not be affected by such lazy appeals to rank bigotry. In the real world, the people in charge of confirming federal judges are Senate Democrats. After remaining mostly silent in the face of weeks of relentless attacks on Mangi, several unnamed Democrats warned the White House that his nomination was on the rocks, according to CNN. Then, on Tuesday, one decided to say so in public: In a statement, Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto announced she would not vote to confirm Mangi, citing his links to “an organization that I have found has connections to individuals who killed police officers.” She may not be the last: Two other Democrats—Tester and Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin—would not say where they stand. A fourth, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, said at the time that he was “not aware” of Mangi, presumably because his K Street interview schedule is leaving him little time for doing any actual work.

Incredibly, Cortez Masto’s proffered excuse is even more embarrassing than the slurry of brain-dead racism that right-wing freaks have been shopping for weeks. As reported by HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery, whose coverage of Mangi’s nomination has been equal parts good and enraging, the “organization” Cortez Masto references is the Alliance of Families for Justice, a nonprofit that provides legal services to incarcerated people, and counseling and other support services to their families. Mangi’s “connections” to AFJ stem from his 2020 representation of the family of a mentally ill man who was killed by a corrections officer. After Mangi won the case, he accepted an invitation to join AFJ’s advisory board—a role that, as Bendery notes, is so ceremonial that the board does not even meet.
…
Regrettably, this is the entire story: Catherine Cortez Masto, who does not have to defend her seat until 2028, wants to scuttle a trailblazing judicial nominee because he once won a landmark civil rights case in conjunction with a nonprofit that, independently of its relationship with Mangi or the case or anything else worth mentioning, also interacted with people whom Republican politicians find objectionable. Charlie Kelly does not have enough colors of yarn to diagram a smear this convoluted, and yet an honest-to-God Democratic senator is credulous enough to act on it.

lol at what a chickenshit Cortez Masto is, most of her Republican colleagues in both houses are more connected to people who killed cops on Jan. 6

[TheDuker]

Having been informed by this article, I was curious as to how the issue would be covered by the NewsHour tonight. They teased the piece by mentioning the “bipartisan” resistance to the nominee and I was ready to commence eye-rolling, but the piece was actually quite reasonable.

It included an interview with a former judge who wrote a letter in support of Mangi.

First Muslim American nominated to federal appeals court faces roadblocks in...

[riverman]

Fuck off Cortez Masto. What the fucking fuck. What a piece of shit. I don’t support it but I understand why some leftists want to blow it all up in the face of shit like this.

[riverman]

[Surf]

If this is real what the actual fuck. Especially in this current environment of every single unsolicited text/call/email being a straight up criminal scammer

[commonWealth]

Establishment Democrats basically are straight up criminal scammers, so…

[pvn]

god democrats are so fucking bad at this, just absolutely awful

[Formula72]

Is 1 out of a 50 actually clicking that? This isn’t how polls work

[Hired_Goons]

Remember when MN did all that great stuff with a one vote majority?

Nicole Mitchell: Minnesota state senator denies theft after burglary arrest

[pvn]

fuck off fetterman this shit getting tired

[Jman220]

Who is he with?

[LouisCyphre]

Looks like his wife.

[Jman220]

What am I missing? What’s the issue? @pvn?

[CaffeineNeeded]

Fetterman continues to be exactly the same person he’s always been, which has started annoying some people who supported him when they thought it was a schtick

[Jman220]

So I was being serious though, I couldn’t actually understand the issue, and now just noticed he’s wearing a hoodie with a fake bow tie. lol.