The Two-Pronged Attack on a Muslim Judicial Nominee
Jonathan Blitzer
judges, senate judiciary committee, senate, nominations
How the smearing of Adeel Mangi became a bipartisan exercise.

When the Senate Judiciary Committee met for a hearing on two nominees to the federal bench, on the morning of December 13th, only one of them was considered controversial. Nicole Berner, a lawyer in her late fifties, had served as general counsel to the Service Employees International Union and, before that, as a staff attorney at Planned Parenthood. Biden had nominated her to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Richmond, Virginia. “Historically, she’s the one who would get all the attention,” a senior committee staffer told me, referring to Berner’s work on labor and reproductive rights. “This is stuff that tends to be red meat for Republicans.” Sitting next to her, in glasses and a navy suit, was the other nominee, Adeel Mangi, a forty-six-year-old corporate lawyer from New Jersey. Mangi was born in Pakistan, educated at Oxford and Harvard, and has lived in the U.S. for more than twenty years. A partner at an élite law firm, he has amassed a long record of pro-bono advocacy on civil-rights and religious-liberty cases. His nomination to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in Philadelphia, was historic: if confirmed, Mangi would become the first Muslim to serve as a federal appellate judge. The White House, along with top Democrats, was eager to celebrate the achievement.

By ten o’clock, as the hearing started, the room was unusually crowded. Berner’s supporters from the labor movement had turned out, expecting a showdown. The exchange went as predicted for half of the hearing, with the first five Republicans grilling Berner about her time with the union. But when it was Ted Cruz’s turn, two hours into the proceedings, he didn’t address Berner at all. “Mr. Mangi,” he began. “Last week, the American people were horrified to watch the testimony of the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn, where all three of them failed to speak clearly, denouncing antisemitism.” This was a reference to a contentious hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in which Republicans, led by Elise Stefanik, the party’s Conference chairwoman and a Harvard alumna, had badgered university presidents about incidents of antisemitism on their campuses. Their cautious, legalistic answers caused a controversy that forced two of them from their jobs. Now, Cruz told Mangi, “I’m perhaps most troubled by the fact that you served as an advisory-board member for the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers Law School from 2019 to 2023. And, sadly, I think that center embraces the same extremism and myopia that we saw on display from the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn.”

Other Republican members had mentioned Mangi’s association with the center. Lindsey Graham, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, had cited a symposium co-sponsored by the center in 2021—“Whose narrative? 20 Years since September 11, 2001”—which featured one speaker who once pleaded guilty to a terrorism-related charge and another who’d helped found Students for Justice in Palestine and had called for “an intifada in the United States.” Mangi wasn’t involved in the center’s daily operations, however, so Graham could only insinuate that Mangi should have been better informed about the event. “I don’t want to belabor it,” Graham said, before moving on.

Cruz, for his part, read from a 2021 letter co-signed by the center’s director and posted on the group’s Web site which decried the “colonial conditions of structural violence and inequality that Palestinians live under.” Did Mangi agree? “Any calls for genocide of any people are absolutely horrific, horrific,” Mangi replied. Cruz grew more combative. In a raised voice, he asked Mangi about October 7th: “Do you condemn the atrocities of the Hamas terrorists?” “Yes,” Mangi began, before Cruz cut him off. “Is there any justification for those atrocities?” he asked. Mangi replied, “Senator, I’ll repeat myself. The events of October 7th were a horror,” adding, after another interruption, “I have no patience—none—for any attempts to justify or defend those events.” When it was Josh Hawley’s turn to address the nominees, a few minutes later, the inquisition continued. “Does Israel have a right to exist?” “Should American Jews be safe in their homes and on their campuses?” Would Mangi say whether he felt that Israel was a “violent colonialist state”? After the hearing, several members of the committee’s staff apologized to Mangi personally. “I’ve sat through hundreds and hundreds of these nominations,” Dick Durbin, the chairman, went on to say. “I will tell you what happened in this committee . . . to this nominee is a new low.”

A month later, the committee’s members gathered for a vote on Berner and Mangi. Several other Republicans on the committee spoke out about Mangi’s association with the Rutgers Center; another flash point, which had not come up in the previous hearing, was that he’d also donated some six thousand dollars to the group, with his law firm contributing more. “Do we really believe he had no knowledge of the deeply hateful and antisemitic nature of the institution that he advised and donated to and worked for for a number of years?” John Cornyn, of Texas, asked. At one point, Marsha Blackburn, a conservative hard-liner from Tennessee, held up a Washington Times op-ed that called Mangi “Hamas’ favorite judicial nominee.”

What Cornyn, Blackburn, and the others failed to mention was that, since the first hearing, prominent Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, had come to Mangi’s defense. These were hardly groups known for their tolerance of antisemites. The Republican senators’ questioning of Mangi on Israel amounted to “inappropriate and prejudicial treatment,” according to a statement from the A.D.L. “This was an attempt to create controversy where one did not exist.” Nevertheless, neither Mangi nor Berner received any Republican support. Each passed out of the Judiciary Committee on strict party-line votes—eleven Democrats to ten Republicans.

On March 19th, the full Senate voted on Berner’s nomination, confirming her to the Fourth Circuit by a razor-thin margin. Mangi’s nomination, meanwhile, never came to the floor. A few days after Berner started her new job on the bench, her son Mattan Berner-Kadish, a union organizer, published an op-ed in the New Jersey Star-Ledger. “Adeel Mangi should be a judge right now,” he wrote. Mangi’s credentials weren’t “the things keeping him off the bench. Racism and Islamophobia are.”

Republicans may have smeared Mangi, but they weren’t the reason that his nomination was stalled. Three Democratic senators opposed him. Without their support, given the uniformity of the Republican opposition, the Democrats lacked the votes. Joe Manchin, who claimed that he couldn’t support a nominee without Republican backers, was the most predictable of these Democratic holdouts. The other two were more surprising: Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, the Nevada delegation.

Cortez Masto, a moderate with law-and-order bona fides (her husband is a retired Secret Service agent), was the first to issue a public statement, which made no mention of Mangi’s association with the Rutgers Center. Instead, Cortez Masto raised another issue: his role on the advisory board of Alliance of Families for Justice, an organization that supports people with relatives in prison. Mangi had already disclosed his ties to the group, which were minimal. In 2016, A.F.J. brought a case to Mangi’s law firm, looking for pro-bono counsel. It involved the death of Karl Taylor, a mentally ill inmate at Sullivan Correctional Facility, in New York, who’d been beaten and choked to death by prison guards the year before. Mangi spent the next few years investigating the case and bringing it to trial in the Southern District of New York. In 2020, on the morning of closing arguments, the prison agreed to a five-million-dollar settlement. The terms included a requirement that the prison install cameras and microphones throughout the facility. Mangi later pointed out that this “will increase safety for corrections officers and help protect them against any attacks from inmates or any false allegations of misconduct.” When A.F.J. asked Mangi to serve on its advisory board, he agreed, though the board never actually met. “It exists to serve as a resource in particular areas of expertise,” Mangi said.

A.F.J. often takes progressive positions that might make centrist Democrats uneasy. Its members and affiliates have, at various points, pushed for the humanitarian release of aging inmates serving long sentences. The group has sponsored events where attendees criticized the carceral system. But Mangi’s detractors gravitated toward what they considered A.F.J.’s original sin: Kathy Boudin, a former Weather Underground activist, who served twenty-two years in prison for her role in a botched 1981 robbery that killed two police officers and a security guard, was a member of the group’s board of directors. Mangi had never met Boudin, who died in 2022, but Cortez Masto still found the connection “deeply concerning.” She and Mangi had a conversation over Zoom in which he tried to address her problems with the group. Afterward, though, she told the press, “This organization has sponsored a fellowship in the name of Kathy Boudin, a member of the domestic terrorist organization Weather Underground, and advocated for the release of individuals convicted of killing police officers.”

Cortez Masto declined to speak with me, but a senior staffer told me that the senator “has heard from law enforcement in both northern and southern Nevada about their concerns with this nominee.” I called the leader of one group, Andrew Regenbaum, who heads the Nevada Association of Public Safety Officers. He’s originally from upstate New York and still has a cell phone with a local area code. Boudin’s crime took place in Rockland County. “That’s where I grew up,” he told me. “The push to get Kathy Boudin out of jail”—which began when she was first up for parole, in 2001—“was pretty controversial back then.” Usually, Regenbaum didn’t follow federal nominees from the East Coast, but in late January he started receiving e-mail blasts from groups such as the National Sheriffs’ Association and the National Association of Police Organizations, calling on local officials to oppose Mangi. “I looked it up and agreed,” Regenbaum told me. (Other state and national law-enforcement organizations did not agree: eight of them, including the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, endorsed Mangi.)

It wasn’t difficult to identify the source of the controversy. The e-mails Regenbaum received coincided with the publication of a story in the Washington Free Beacon, an online right-wing news outlet, which claimed to have discovered Mangi’s connection to “a left-wing group with extensive ties to convicted cop killers.” It ran on December 15, 2023, two days after Mangi’s Senate hearing. Senators had a week to submit further written questions to the nominees. Yet, among the three hundred and twenty-eight follow-up questions Mangi received, not one of them mentioned his affiliation with A.F.J. In the January committee vote, the issue didn’t come up once. To my Senate sources, the disparity—another line of attack that none of Mangi’s Republican opponents felt the need to take up—was proof that those fighting his nomination were willing to dredge up anything.

“The traditional pattern that we see is that the controversy seems to blow over, then the dark-money attacks pick up,” the senior staffer on the Judiciary Committee told me. All through the winter, vulnerable Democrats in Montana and Pennsylvania were targeted with digital ads accusing Mangi of antisemitism. One of them, run by the Judicial Crisis Network, included footage from 9/11. “What we’re used to is that the line of attacks stays the same,” the staffer continued. “This one was different.” Another Democratic staffer told me, “These are two prongs of the same attack. When the antisemite line didn’t work in scaring away Democrats, they turned to the idea that he was anti-cop.”

Mangi is now in the peculiar limbo state of a doomed nominee. His nomination is close to being dead. All that’s left is a pronouncement that Democratic leadership is reluctant to make. The White House has continued to defend him, out of a combination of principle and pragmatism. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals is currently tilted in favor of conservatives by a single judge; if Mangi were confirmed, a Biden nominee would even the balance. The Administration could also claim a historic victory for Muslim representation, at a time when the left wing of the Democratic Party has assailed the President for his handling of the war in Gaza. Top officials, including the President’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, have been making the case to senators. “The smears have been painfully frustrating on more levels than I can count,” another White House official told me. Earlier this month, on the Senate floor, Durbin lambasted Republicans for vilifying Mangi and called for a fair consideration of his credentials. He “deserves to be evaluated based on his record, not on bad-faith falsehoods and innuendo,” Durbin said. It was a plea to Democrats disguised as a criticism of Republicans.

Mangi himself won’t speak to the press while he’s still, technically, under the consideration of the full Senate. His most vocal defender has been his home-state senator, Cory Booker, who first brought him to the attention of the White House. We spoke on Tuesday, as Booker was returning from a trip to Nevada, where he’d just attended a fund-raiser for a House member. “I did not see this coming,” he told me.

In New Jersey, Booker relied on a bipartisan group of lawyers and state representatives to find moderate candidates for the federal bench. “We never tried to propose someone who’d be a firebrand, especially not a Third Circuit judge,” he said. “We wanted a consensus-building candidate to avoid, frankly, any kind of partisan attacks.” He likened Mangi to Ketanji Brown Jackson—someone who, in Booker’s estimation, wasn’t just “eminently qualified” but also radiated a sense of uncommon decency. Booker referred to this quality, in Mangi, as the “apple-pie earnestness” of his “American story.” He added, “I could just see the moment he was sworn in.”

After Mangi’s hearing, Booker printed out the transcript of Cruz’s questions and read parts of it aloud, first to his colleagues behind closed doors, and then on the Senate floor. Each time, he told me, he did it “without injecting any emotion, just reading the dry transcript. It was so on-its-face appalling. . . . It was so stark.”

Still, there was no escaping the fact that Mangi had lost support among a few key Democrats. What did Booker make of the criticism, advanced by Cortez Masto, that Mangi’s association with A.F.J. was a dealbreaker? “I have seen this happen a lot in American politics,” he said. “The far-right wing throws fifty stink bombs and mud against the wall, hoping that something will stick and get picked up by the mainstream. So you see all these personal takedowns.” He saw his role as telling other Democrats, “If you have come to hear these things, let me show you this fact pattern. If you’ve come to have someone in your state, whom you trust, that’s telling you x, let me show you why that person is mistaken.”

Booker himself was shaken by how Mangi’s nomination had been “dashed and dirtied.” But he wasn’t yet prepared to concede that a judgeship was out of the question. “This is not over,” Booker said. “The reality in politics is that things change. People have been known to change their minds. People have been known to give an honest consideration of facts. I hope this is not an epitaph.” ♦
How the smearing of Adeel Mangi became a bipartisan exercise.
When the Senate Judiciary Committee met for a hearing on two nominees to the federal bench, on the morning of December 13th, only one of them was considered controversial. Nicole Berner, a lawyer in her late fifties, had served as general counsel to the Service Employees International Union and, before that, as a staff attorney at Planned Parenthood. Biden had nominated her to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Richmond, Virginia. “Historically, she’s the one who would get all the attention,” a senior committee staffer told me, referring to Berner’s work on labor and reproductive rights. “This is stuff that tends to be red meat for Republicans.” Sitting next to her, in glasses and a navy suit, was the other nominee, Adeel Mangi, a forty-six-year-old corporate lawyer from New Jersey. Mangi was born in Pakistan, educated at Oxford and Harvard, and has lived in the U.S. for more than twenty years. A partner at an élite law firm, he has amassed a long record of pro-bono advocacy on civil-rights and religious-liberty cases. His nomination to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in Philadelphia, was historic: if confirmed, Mangi would become the first Muslim to serve as a federal appellate judge. The White House, along with top Democrats, was eager to celebrate the achievement. By ten o’clock, as the hearing started, the room was unusually crowded. Berner’s supporters from the labor movement had turned out, expecting a showdown. The exchange went as predicted for half of the hearing, with the first five Republicans grilling Berner about her time with the union. But when it was Ted Cruz’s turn, two hours into the proceedings, he didn’t address Berner at all. “Mr. Mangi,” he began. “Last week, the American people were horrified to watch the testimony of the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn, where all three of them failed to speak clearly, denouncing antisemitism.” This was a reference to a contentious hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in which Republicans, led by Elise Stefanik, the party’s Conference chairwoman and a Harvard alumna, had badgered university presidents about incidents of antisemitism on their campuses. Their cautious, legalistic answers caused a controversy that forced two of them from their jobs. Now, Cruz told Mangi, “I’m perhaps most troubled by the fact that you served as an advisory-board member for the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers Law School from 2019 to 2023. And, sadly, I think that center embraces the same extremism and myopia that we saw on display from the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn.” Other Republican members had mentioned Mangi’s association with the center. Lindsey Graham, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, had cited a symposium co-sponsored by the center in 2021—“Whose narrative? 20 Years since September 11, 2001”—which featured one speaker who once pleaded guilty to a terrorism-related charge and another who’d helped found Students for Justice in Palestine and had called for “an intifada in the United States.” Mangi wasn’t involved in the center’s daily operations, however, so Graham could only insinuate that Mangi should have been better informed about the event. “I don’t want to belabor it,” Graham said, before moving on. Cruz, for his part, read from a 2021 letter co-signed by the center’s director and posted on the group’s Web site which decried the “colonial conditions of structural violence and inequality that Palestinians live under.” Did Mangi agree? “Any calls for genocide of any people are absolutely horrific, horrific,” Mangi replied. Cruz grew more combative. In a raised voice, he asked Mangi about October 7th: “Do you condemn the atrocities of the Hamas terrorists?” “Yes,” Mangi began, before Cruz cut him off. “Is there any justification for those atrocities?” he asked. Mangi replied, “Senator, I’ll repeat myself. The events of October 7th were a horror,” adding, after another interruption, “I have no patience—none—for any attempts to justify or defend those events.” When it was Josh Hawley’s turn to address the nominees, a few minutes later, the inquisition continued. “Does Israel have a right to exist?” “Should American Jews be safe in their homes and on their campuses?” Would Mangi say whether he felt that Israel was a “violent colonialist state”? After the hearing, several members of the committee’s staff apologized to Mangi personally. “I’ve sat through hundreds and hundreds of these nominations,” Dick Durbin, the chairman, went on to say. “I will tell you what happened in this committee . . . to this nominee is a new low.” A month later, the committee’s members gathered for a vote on Berner and Mangi. Several other Republicans on the committee spoke out about Mangi’s association with the Rutgers Center; another flash point, which had not come up in the previous hearing, was that he’d also donated some six thousand dollars to the group, with his law firm contributing more. “Do we really believe he had no knowledge of the deeply hateful and antisemitic nature of the institution that he advised and donated to and worked for for a number of years?” John Cornyn, of Texas, asked. At one point, Marsha Blackburn, a conservative hard-liner from Tennessee, held up a Washington Times op-ed that called Mangi “Hamas’ favorite judicial nominee.” What Cornyn, Blackburn, and the others failed to mention was that, since the first hearing, prominent Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, had come to Mangi’s defense. These were hardly groups known for their tolerance of antisemites. The Republican senators’ questioning of Mangi on Israel amounted to “inappropriate and prejudicial treatment,” according to a statement from the A.D.L. “This was an attempt to create controversy where one did not exist.” Nevertheless, neither Mangi nor Berner received any Republican support. Each passed out of the Judiciary Committee on strict party-line votes—eleven Democrats to ten Republicans. On March 19th, the full Senate voted on Berner’s nomination, confirming her to the Fourth Circuit by a razor-thin margin. Mangi’s nomination, meanwhile, never came to the floor. A few days after Berner started her new job on the bench, her son Mattan Berner-Kadish, a union organizer, published an op-ed in the New Jersey Star-Ledger. “Adeel Mangi should be a judge right now,” he wrote. Mangi’s credentials weren’t “the things keeping him off the bench. Racism and Islamophobia are.” Republicans may have smeared Mangi, but they weren’t the reason that his nomination was stalled. Three Democratic senators opposed him. Without their support, given the uniformity of the Republican opposition, the Democrats lacked the votes. Joe Manchin, who claimed that he couldn’t support a nominee without Republican backers, was the most predictable of these Democratic holdouts. The other two were more surprising: Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, the Nevada delegation. Cortez Masto, a moderate with law-and-order bona fides (her husband is a retired Secret Service agent), was the first to issue a public statement, which made no mention of Mangi’s association with the Rutgers Center. Instead, Cortez Masto raised another issue: his role on the advisory board of Alliance of Families for Justice, an organization that supports people with relatives in prison. Mangi had already disclosed his ties to the group, which were minimal. In 2016, A.F.J. brought a case to Mangi’s law firm, looking for pro-bono counsel. It involved the death of Karl Taylor, a mentally ill inmate at Sullivan Correctional Facility, in New York, who’d been beaten and choked to death by prison guards the year before. Mangi spent the next few years investigating the case and bringing it to trial in the Southern District of New York. In 2020, on the morning of closing arguments, the prison agreed to a five-million-dollar settlement. The terms included a requirement that the prison install cameras and microphones throughout the facility. Mangi later pointed out that this “will increase safety for corrections officers and help protect them against any attacks from inmates or any false allegations of misconduct.” When A.F.J. asked Mangi to serve on its advisory board, he agreed, though the board never actually met. “It exists to serve as a resource in particular areas of expertise,” Mangi said. A.F.J. often takes progressive positions that might make centrist Democrats uneasy. Its members and affiliates have, at various points, pushed for the humanitarian release of aging inmates serving long sentences. The group has sponsored events where attendees criticized the carceral system. But Mangi’s detractors gravitated toward what they considered A.F.J.’s original sin: Kathy Boudin, a former Weather Underground activist, who served twenty-two years in prison for her role in a botched 1981 robbery that killed two police officers and a security guard, was a member of the group’s board of directors. Mangi had never met Boudin, who died in 2022, but Cortez Masto still found the connection “deeply concerning.” She and Mangi had a conversation over Zoom in which he tried to address her problems with the group. Afterward, though, she told the press, “This organization has sponsored a fellowship in the name of Kathy Boudin, a member of the domestic terrorist organization Weather Underground, and advocated for the release of individuals convicted of killing police officers.” Cortez Masto declined to speak with me, but a senior staffer told me that the senator “has heard from law enforcement in both northern and southern Nevada about their concerns with this nominee.” I called the leader of one group, Andrew Regenbaum, who heads the Nevada Association of Public Safety Officers. He’s originally from upstate New York and still has a cell phone with a local area code. Boudin’s crime took place in Rockland County. “That’s where I grew up,” he told me. “The push to get Kathy Boudin out of jail”—which began when she was first up for parole, in 2001—“was pretty controversial back then.” Usually, Regenbaum didn’t follow federal nominees from the East Coast, but in late January he started receiving e-mail blasts from groups such as the National Sheriffs’ Association and the National Association of Police Organizations, calling on local officials to oppose Mangi. “I looked it up and agreed,” Regenbaum told me. (Other state and national law-enforcement organizations did not agree: eight of them, including the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, endorsed Mangi.) It wasn’t difficult to identify the source of the controversy. The e-mails Regenbaum received coincided with the publication of a story in the Washington Free Beacon, an online right-wing news outlet, which claimed to have discovered Mangi’s connection to “a left-wing group with extensive ties to convicted cop killers.” It ran on December 15, 2023, two days after Mangi’s Senate hearing. Senators had a week to submit further written questions to the nominees. Yet, among the three hundred and twenty-eight follow-up questions Mangi received, not one of them mentioned his affiliation with A.F.J. In the January committee vote, the issue didn’t come up once. To my Senate sources, the disparity—another line of attack that none of Mangi’s Republican opponents felt the need to take up—was proof that those fighting his nomination were willing to dredge up anything. “The traditional pattern that we see is that the controversy seems to blow over, then the dark-money attacks pick up,” the senior staffer on the Judiciary Committee told me. All through the winter, vulnerable Democrats in Montana and Pennsylvania were targeted with digital ads accusing Mangi of antisemitism. One of them, run by the Judicial Crisis Network, included footage from 9/11. “What we’re used to is that the line of attacks stays the same,” the staffer continued. “This one was different.” Another Democratic staffer told me, “These are two prongs of the same attack. When the antisemite line didn’t work in scaring away Democrats, they turned to the idea that he was anti-cop.” Mangi is now in the peculiar limbo state of a doomed nominee. His nomination is close to being dead. All that’s left is a pronouncement that Democratic leadership is reluctant to make. The White House has continued to defend him, out of a combination of principle and pragmatism. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals is currently tilted in favor of conservatives by a single judge; if Mangi were confirmed, a Biden nominee would even the balance. The Administration could also claim a historic victory for Muslim representation, at a time when the left wing of the Democratic Party has assailed the President for his handling of the war in Gaza. Top officials, including the President’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, have been making the case to senators. “The smears have been painfully frustrating on more levels than I can count,” another White House official told me. Earlier this month, on the Senate floor, Durbin lambasted Republicans for vilifying Mangi and called for a fair consideration of his credentials. He “deserves to be evaluated based on his record, not on bad-faith falsehoods and innuendo,” Durbin said. It was a plea to Democrats disguised as a criticism of Republicans. Mangi himself won’t speak to the press while he’s still, technically, under the consideration of the full Senate. His most vocal defender has been his home-state senator, Cory Booker, who first brought him to the attention of the White House. We spoke on Tuesday, as Booker was returning from a trip to Nevada, where he’d just attended a fund-raiser for a House member. “I did not see this coming,” he told me. In New Jersey, Booker relied on a bipartisan group of lawyers and state representatives to find moderate candidates for the federal bench. “We never tried to propose someone who’d be a firebrand, especially not a Third Circuit judge,” he said. “We wanted a consensus-building candidate to avoid, frankly, any kind of partisan attacks.” He likened Mangi to Ketanji Brown Jackson—someone who, in Booker’s estimation, wasn’t just “eminently qualified” but also radiated a sense of uncommon decency. Booker referred to this quality, in Mangi, as the “apple-pie earnestness” of his “American story.” He added, “I could just see the moment he was sworn in.” After Mangi’s hearing, Booker printed out the transcript of Cruz’s questions and read parts of it aloud, first to his colleagues behind closed doors, and then on the Senate floor. Each time, he told me, he did it “without injecting any emotion, just reading the dry transcript. It was so on-its-face appalling. . . . It was so stark.” Still, there was no escaping the fact that Mangi had lost support among a few key Democrats. What did Booker make of the criticism, advanced by Cortez Masto, that Mangi’s association with A.F.J. was a dealbreaker? “I have seen this happen a lot in American politics,” he said. “The far-right wing throws fifty stink bombs and mud against the wall, hoping that something will stick and get picked up by the mainstream. So you see all these personal takedowns.” He saw his role as telling other Democrats, “If you have come to hear these things, let me show you this fact pattern. If you’ve come to have someone in your state, whom you trust, that’s telling you x, let me show you why that person is mistaken.” Booker himself was shaken by how Mangi’s nomination had been “dashed and dirtied.” But he wasn’t yet prepared to concede that a judgeship was out of the question. “This is not over,” Booker said. “The reality in politics is that things change. People have been known to change their minds. People have been known to give an honest consideration of facts. I hope this is not an epitaph.” ♦