Potential Senate fight looms over judicial nominee who helped craft Trump immigration policy by alexnazaryan
A deft and ambitious White House lawyer admired by Washington’s conservative elites, Menashi was nominated in August. Since then, progressives have pounced on his writings to paint him as a right-wing ideologue who does not belong on the federal bench.
Progressives say their hands are clean, and that they’ve done nothing but underscore Menashi’s own words, in particular his prolific contributions to conservative media outlets, for which he has written since his days as a college activist two decades ago. President Trump has two Supreme Court justices of his own in Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch. But he has had an even greater impact on lower courts, where the overwhelming majority of cases are ultimately decided. According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative organization that has helped the Trump administration with judicial nominations, Trump has successfully nominated 144 lower-court judges, making his the most aggressive reshaping of the judiciary branch in decades.
Administration officials are conducting efforts of their own, with help from outside groups like the Article III Project and the Judicial Crisis Network, whose chief counsel, Carrie Severino, was among Kavanaugh’s most forceful defenders. Menashi, however, may suffer from his own shortcomings. One Capitol Hill insider involved in Republican nomination efforts, including that of Kavanaugh, described Menashi as cold and arrogant. He worried that Menashi’s personality alone could hamper him in meeting with senators like Scott.
Menashi continued to write after graduating from law school at Stanford. He was on the editorial board of the New York Sun, a now-defunct conservative daily. Later, he founded a blog called the American Scene with Ross Douthat, the future New York Times columnist. After leaving the Sun in 2005, he worked briefly for the Pentagon and later clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., one of the high court’s most reliable conservatives.
Menashi’s supporters were furious because Maddow neglected to mention that Menashi, who is Jewish, was talking about Israel, not the United States, and was attempting to make an argument about democracy and demography. Some even accused her of anti-Semitism. But they were also upset that the White House did not marshal a defense of Menashi to rally Trump’s base.
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