Republicans Just Confirmed Trump’s Most Ghastly Nominee. Democrats Made It Possible.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

This article was republished in partnership with Balls and Strikes.

On Tuesday evening, the Senate voted to confirm Emil Bove, President Donald Trump’s criminal defense attorney-turned-Justice Department hatchetman, to a life-tenured judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Bove first made headlines for firing dozens of January 6 prosecutors shortly after Trump took office, parroting the president’s description of these cases as a “grave national injustice.” According to multiple whistleblowers, in March, Bove told his Justice Department subordinates that they might need to say “fuck you” to judges who were attempting to slow the White House’s various efforts to disappear noncitizens to foreign gulags. These whistleblower allegations should not be confused with separate whistleblower allegations that Bove lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee about his role in the dismissal of criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams—a stunt so cartoonishly corrupt that a half-dozen federal prosecutors resigned in protest.

To the best of my knowledge, Bove’s confirmation thus makes him the first-ever federal judge who is most famous for profanely asserting that a Republican president is free to ignore federal judges who have the audacity to issue orders he does not like.

Bove was opposed by several prominent conservative legal activists, more than 80 former judges, and more than 900 former Department of Justice attorneys, who in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee called Bove’s confirmation “intolerable to anyone committed to maintaining our ordered system of justice.” Yet 50 Senate Republicans, to whom this description evidently does not apply, nevertheless did as they were told. Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted no, along with all 47 Senate Democrats.

Last year, Democrats could have used their Senate majority to confirm someone very different to fill the seat: Adeel Mangi, a law firm partner whom President Joe Biden nominated in November 2023. But in the months that followed, as Republicans pushed an unhinged narrative that Mangi, who would have been the first-ever Muslim federal appeals court judge, was a cop-hating terrorist sympathizer, a handful of Democratic senators began to waver. The nomination then hung in procedural limbo for nearly a year until Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, which effectively killed Mangi’s chances at confirmation. As a result, the judgeship that could have been Adeel Mangi’s is now occupied by Bove, a smirking bootlicker whose primary qualification for the job is his willingness to do whatever Mister Trump wants.

Almost immediately after Biden announced Mangi’s nomination, Republicans began subjecting him to what is, even in this country’s long tradition of egregious Islamophobic smear campaigns, one of the most egregious Islamophobic smear campaigns I can remember. At his confirmation hearing, one Republican senator asked how Mangi “celebrates” September 11, and others asked him if there was any “justification” for the October 7 attacks. When Mangi said no, and condemned the attacks as “horrific” and rejected “any attempts to justify or defend them,” Republicans simply came up with different ways of asking the same question.

Other conservative activists supplemented this unvarnished anti-Muslim bigotry with old-fashioned crime-and-punishment fearmongering. Prior to his nomination, Mangi worked with the Alliance of Families for Justice, an anti-mass incarceration nonprofit, to represent on a pro bono basis the family of Karl Taylor, a man who was killed by corrections officers in New York in 2015. After Mangi won a groundbreaking $5 million settlement for Taylor’s family, he accepted an invitation to join the organization’s board, which is so ceremonial that it does not even meet.

Like most anti-mass incarceration nonprofits, AFJ sometimes collaborates on its reform efforts with people who have been previously convicted of crimes—people who, despite Republican politicians’ fervent beliefs to the contrary, do not surrender their constitutional rights the moment they enter state custody. This is all his opponents need to attempt the most hamfisted smear-by-association imaginable: In December 2023, a conservative media outlet decried Mangi for his links to ​“a left-wing group with extensive ties to convicted cop killers,” framing it as manifest evidence of his unfitness for office.

Even at the time, the farcical nature of the attacks on Mangi was readily apparent to anyone capable of conducting a few Google searches. Regrettably, this group does not include Nevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who announced in March 2024 that she would oppose Mangi in light of his ties to “an organization that I have found has connections to individuals who killed police officers.” Sen. Jacky Rosen, also of Nevada and also a Democrat, followed suit, citing “concerns” that she’d purportedly​ “heard from law enforcement.”

At the time, Democrats held a 51-49 advantage in the Senate, which meant that Republicans needed to pick off only two Democrats to defeat a nomination. But that same month, West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin narrowed the margin further, pledging not to vote for any Biden nominee without at least one Republican supporter. There may have been other Democrats who would have refused to back Mangi, but they never had to say so in public: Thanks to the credulousness and/or cowardice of Cortez Masto and Rosen, Republicans secured the two defections they needed. Manchin’s unquenchable thirst for attention gave them room to spare.

Mangi’s defeat did not become official, though, until November 2024, when then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, racing to confirm as many nominees as possible during the lame duck session, struck a deal with his Republican colleagues: In exchange for the confirmations of a group of pending district court nominees, Democrats agreed to stand down on four appeals court nominees, including Mangi, effectively handing the coveted seat to Trump and the incoming Republican majority. Mangi responded to his abandonment in a blistering letter to Biden, excoriating not only Republicans for their “performative outrage” but also Democrats for (once again) falling for it: Referring to Cortez Masto and Rosen, Mangi said that they either “lack the wisdom to discern the truth, which exposes a catastrophic lack of judgment,” or used his nomination to “court conservative voters, which exposes a catastrophic lack of principle.”

Mangi addressed Manchin separately. “To fetishize bipartisanship amidst an outrageous attack campaign is not a virtue,” he wrote. “It is a preening abandonment of morality.”

Manchin retired in 2024 rather than seek-relection, and is now writing Dead Center: A Defense of Common Sense, the first political memoir that will be purchased exclusively by coal industry lobbyists who can expense their Axios Pro subscriptions. But Cortez Masto and Rosen are still in the Senate, and both voted to reject Bove. So in light of his confirmation, I reached out to Cortez Masto’s office to ask if she now regrets withholding her support from Mangi. A spokesperson provided me with the following statement: “Senator Cortez Masto made her opposition to Adeel Mangi clear in March of 2024 due to his anti-law enforcement record and opposition from key law enforcement groups, giving the Biden Administration plenty of time to find a solution. She does not support Emil Bove’s confirmation to the seat.” Neither Rosen’s office nor representatives for Manchin responded to my requests for comment.

It is true that Senate Democrats held razor-thin majorities during the Biden administration. But whipping the votes for a nominee as milquetoast as Mangi, a BigLaw partner who’d practiced at the same New York City firm for nearly 25 years, should not have been especially difficult. Instead, a critical mass of Democrats caved to bad-faith attacks rooted in howlingly obvious bigotry, and leadership decided that fighting for his nomination was not worth their time or effort. It remains disgraceful that even today, the most forceful defense of Mangi from anyone involved came not from a Democratic senator, but from Mangi himself. “I entered this nomination process as a proud American and a proud Muslim,” he wrote in his letter to Biden. “I exit it the same way, unbowed.”

Speaking from the Senate floor after the vote became official, now-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Bove’s confirmation “a sacrilegious act against our democracy,” and a “deep violation against the spirit of our oaths of office.” He is right. But he is omitting the simple fact that Senate Democrats had the power and the opportunity to confirm a qualified nominee to the seat. They chose to surrender it to Trump instead.

Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.