Every Republican in the U.S. Senate but one just voted to hand Steven Menashi, an anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, anti-Islam, misogynistic right wing extremist, a lifetime appointment as a judge on the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
No Democrat voted for Menashi. Senator Susan Collins of Maine was the only Republican to vote against his nomination. The final vote was 51-41.
Menashi, who is just 40 years old, is not only unqualified to sit on a federal appeals court because he has never tried or argued a case, his history should have been deemed automatically disqualifying.
HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendary reports Menashi, “currently Trump’s White House legal aide, compared race data collection in college admissions to Germany under Adolf Hitler; denounced women’s marches against sexual assault; opposed the ‘radical abortion rights codified in Roe v. Wad’; accused the Human Rights Campaign of having ‘incessantly exploited the slaying of Matthew Shepard’ for political benefit, and 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.”
If that weren’t enough, Menashi “also spread the Islamophobic myth that in 1913, Gen. John Pershing executed Muslim prisoners in the Philippines using bullets dipped in pig fat.”
That last one is a favorite of President Donald Trump’s – except he prefers the tale told with “pig’s blood.”
There’s actually more.
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that Menashi also helped devise an illegal Education Department effort to use private Social Security data to deny debt relief to thousands of students cheated by for-profit colleges.
Despite – or more likely, because of – all this, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McxConnell on Thursday called Menashi “impressive.”
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) had a different perspective.
Former Obama DOJ official Vanita Gupta, now the President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights:
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR):