Unbelievable

The Senate voted Thursday to make Steven Menashi a lifetime federal judge, despite his inflammatory writings about women’s rights and diversity, his refusal to answer senators’ questions and his role in devising an illegal Education Department effort to deny debt relief to students cheated by for-profit colleges.

  HuffPo

Despite, or precisely because of?

Nearly every national civil and women’s rights group opposed him, including the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, the Human Rights Campaign, Muslim Advocates and Planned Parenthood. Democrats questioned his qualifications ― he has never tried a case, made oral arguments in court or conducted a deposition ― as well as his temperament.

[...]

[He] claimed that a Dartmouth fraternity wasn’t being racist when it held a “ghetto party” attended by white students donning Afros and carrying toy guns.

He also spread the Islamophobic myth that in 1913, Gen. John Pershing executed Muslim prisoners in the Philippines using bullets dipped in pig fat.

During his confirmation hearing last month, Menashi angered both Republican and Democratic senators by refusing to give details about his White House legal work. He conceded that he worked on immigration policies with Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s ban on travelers from several Muslim-majority countries and Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

[...]

Menashi ignored senators’ follow-up questions about his potential role in White House efforts to cover up evidence of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that is at the center of the House impeachment inquiry. Menashi has been Trump’s legal adviser for more than a year.

[...]

None of these details swayed Republicans to oppose Menashi.

“Mr. Menashi won major support from the Judiciary Committee ... on the basis of strong academic and legal qualifications,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said ahead of Thursday’s vote. “I would urge all of our colleagues to confirm this impressive nominee.”

And everybody's scared of Mitch.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals is based in New York, where Menashi doesn’t have support from either of the home-state senators — something that rarely happens and is embarrassing. Both of them condemned him ahead of his confirmation vote.

Before Trump there was a generally respected procedure that blocked judges from consideration if their home state Senators refused to back them. The "blue slip" procedure.

Menashi will now fill a seat on the 2nd Court of Appeals that was previously held by former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a champion of civil rights.

Who is turning in his grave right now.