Opinion | Three Democratic Senators Are Stuck Indulging an Outdated Fantasy

In 1999, a Florida lawyer, Anuraag Singhal, represented a man convicted of gunning down a police officer. Singhal had to somehow persuade a jury that his client, Jeffrey Lee Weaver, should face life in prison rather than the electric chair, the punishment the hard-charging prosecutor sought.

“I hope you can find some love in your heart for Jeff Weaver, and I hope you’ll let him die in prison,” Singhal said, according to a report in The Sun Sentinel, the local newspaper. The article described tears rolling down his cheeks and his voice breaking with emotion as he pleaded for Weaver’s life. Singhal won the day. A divided jury recommended life in prison.

Singhal was clearly a very talented attorney and a man on the rise. He would become active in conservative legal circles, joining the local chapter of the Federalist Society. In 2019, President Donald Trump appointed him to a federal judgeship in Florida. He was confirmed that December with a bipartisan Senate vote of 76 to 17. Evidently no one raised a peep about his defense of a man who killed a police officer, nor his pivotal role in reducing the man’s sentence despite Republican posturing about protecting law enforcement.

Among the Democratic senators who voted to give Singhal this lifetime appointment were three centrists who often burnish their bipartisan bona fides and tough-on-crime credentials: Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, both of Nevada, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

So it is striking that these same three senators have come out to announce that they will not support an eminently qualified nominee of their own party’s president after Republican senators and conservative activists smeared him, first accusing him of being an antisemite and, when that effort fizzled in the face of staunch support from mainstream Jewish organizations, of being soft on crime and supporting cop killers.

The ostensible reason? The nominee, Adeel Abdullah Mangi, served on an advisory board of an organization that supports the families of people in prison and helps formerly incarcerated people as they try to rebuild their lives.

“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 said in a statement. “I cannot support this nominee.”

Mangi would make history as the first Muslim American federal appellate judge. Republicans are grasping at straws to block him. Why on earth would Democrats hand them a rope? One glance at the facts reveals that the insinuation that Mangi supported Boudin or the idea of releasing killers of police officers is as baseless as the allegation that he is an antisemite.

The organization in question is the Alliance of Families for Justice. Mangi did not seek out the group on his own. His corporate law firm, through its pro bono practice, asked him to take on a case that the organization had brought on behalf of a New York inmate who died after being beaten and choked by prison guards. In 2020, Mangi won a $5 million payment to the prisoner’s family, and the state also agreed to install cameras and microphones throughout the prison as part of the settlement, a huge policy victory that would not only protect inmates but also protect guards from false allegations of misconduct.

This is the kind of pro bono work that normally would be a résumé-burnisher for a Democratic judicial nominee whose day-to-day caseload involves litigating on behalf of major corporations. After the big win, the Alliance of Families for Justice asked Mangi to join an advisory panel to evaluate similar cases the organization might take on in the future. Mangi agreed, but according to a letter he sent to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, a copy of which I acquired, the panel has never held a single meeting, and he never handled another case brought by the organization. He had no role in the organization’s governance or operations.

Boudin, who served more than 20 years in prison for her role in a deadly robbery in 1981, had ties to the alliance after she was paroled. She long expressed remorse for her role in the robbery, in which two police officers were killed. She died in 2022, having spent her last years advocating restorative justice and criminal justice reform. There was another, hard-to-follow allegation that the organization was involved in an event calling to release elderly and infirm prisoners, including Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther who was serving a life sentence for killing a police officer.

I realize that not everyone is invested in legal defense for people convicted of murdering police officers. But it hardly matters because Mangi had nothing to do with these cases. In his letter to Booker, Mangi said he had never met Boudin and had no involvement with an event associated with Abu-Jamal. Indeed, the notion that his very slight connection to this organization might derail his nomination casts a pall on any attorney who does pro bono work.

Mangi wrote in his letter to Booker that he has never defended someone accused of killing a police officer. “I condemn any violence against law enforcement officers without equivocation,” he said. Some police organizations have opposed his nomination, but others have supported him. The Leadership Conference, a coalition of mainstream civic, labor and human rights groups that are central to the Democratic Party — think of household names like the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the N.A.A.C.P. and the United Steelworkers — released a letter this week in strong support of his confirmation. A former Third Circuit judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush also wrote to Booker in support of Mangi last month, saying, “This is a nominee who should — and ordinarily would — have widespread bipartisan support,” according to HuffPost. “Instead, he is being subjected to attacks against his character.”

These allegations are so threadbare that they did not even come up in his confirmation hearing. Republican senators were too busy demanding that Mangi denounce Hamas. They only pivoted when that attempt failed. Democratic senators may wish to appear to have rejected the Islamophobic smears, but it is dismaying that these equally baseless accusations have become a fig leaf for Democrats running for re-election who fear attacks from well-funded far-right judicial activist groups.

But in a way it is Joe Manchin, who is not running for re-election and has no excuse other than his fetish for performative bipartisanship, who most powerfully illustrates what is most enraging about this whole episode. He is the most extreme illustration of a Democratic tendency to unilaterally disarm in the face of bad faith actions of the Republican Party. It bespeaks a willingness to pretend that an old way of doing politics — the give and take between broadly reasonable, well-meaning people — still exists in American politics. This is a fantasy Democrats indulge at their peril.

It is not uncommon for senators to ask questions about a nominee’s political or even religious background and whether that background would color their jurisprudence. Amy Coney Barrett was asked about her deeply conservative religious faith in her confirmation hearings for the federal bench in 2017.

“If you’re asking whether I take my faith seriously and I’m a faithful Catholic — I am, although I would stress that my personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge,” she testified.

Asked about making paid speeches to a controversial conservative legal organization, she replied: “It has never been my practice to investigate all of the policy positions of a group that invites me to speak.”

Fair enough. If that is the standard, why wouldn’t it apply to a nominee like Mangi as well?

Which brings us back to Anuraag Singhal. He spent much of his career as a criminal defense lawyer, representing people accused of a wide range of violent and nonviolent crimes. Singhal’s work defending a man who killed a police officer was honorable and ethical. He was fulfilling his crucial role in our justice system. I wish every death penalty defendant had such skilled counsel.

From the available evidence, he appears to have a sterling legal record and has so far proved to be a fair-minded judge on the federal bench. Democrats were right to vote for his confirmation, exactly as the Constitution envisioned the Senate’s role to advise and consent to a president’s judicial nominees. On this very same principle they should dismiss these baseless smears and vote to confirm Adeel Mangi without delay.