Professional Troll Awarded Lifetime Appointment By Senate

On Thursday, the Senate confirmed Trump goon Steven Menashi to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court in a 51-41 vote partisan split. Every Republican present, except Sen. Susan Collins, voted for Menachi, a controversial and radical White House lawyer who was notably evasive during his confirmation hearings.

His confirmation is notable for a few reasons: with the addition of Menashi, Trump has now flipped the 2nd Circuit to a majority Republican appointee body, which will have substantial power over pending lawsuits against the president in the state of New York. But it’s Menashi’s history of nativism and misogyny that makes his appointment especially odious.

Within the Trump administration, Menashi worked with fellow white ethnostate enthusiast Stephen Miller to curate Trump’s immigration and asylum policies. He has also collaborated with Education Secretary Betsy Devos to roll back Title IX protections for marginalized students and reportedly devised a plan to use Social Security data to deny debt relief from victims of for-profit colleges schemes (which a judge ruled violated privacy laws).

And before he was a Trump administration darling, he was a professional troll, publishing inflammatory writings about Islam, people of color, LGBTQ, women, and the poor. Here’s a brief summation of those writings, via Slate:

In college, Menashi condemned Take Back the Night marches, complaining that “campus gynocentrists” unfairly accuse “the majority of male students with complicity in rape and sexual violence.” He asked why the Human Rights Campaign “incessantly exploited the slaying of Matthew Shepard” but did not discuss murders committed by gay men. He charged “tony colleges” with hypocrisy for allowing LGBTQ residence communities while “sneer[ing] at the military for worrying about open homosexuals in the ranks.” He compared college applications that listed race to the Nuremberg Laws. He defended a mostly white frat’s “ghetto party,” during which white students sported afros and toy guns. He wrote that Brown University’s Third World Transition Program for minority students was meant “to fully indoctrinate them in leftist multiculturalism.” And he described academic multiculturalism as a “thoroughly bankrupt” effort that is all “about denigrating Western culture in order to promote self-esteem among ‘marginalized’ groups.”

Menashi also wrote about reproductive rights, expressing skepticism that emergency contraception is different than an abortion pill, and sneering at the “radical abortion rights advocated by campus feminists and codified in Roe v. Wade,” likening abortion to infanticide. He carried this disdain with him: He defended the right for employers to deny employees birth control promised by the Affordable Care Act. According to Planned Parenthood, Menashi even helped write an amicus brief in Zubik v Burwell, a 2016 Supreme Court case on whether non-church religious institutions should be exempt from the contraceptive mandate.

Anna Chu, Vice President for Strategy and Policy at the National Women’s Law Center, released the following statement regarding Menashi’s confirmation:

Shame on those in Congress who pushed this outrageous vote through. Menashi’s record of undermining the fundamental rights of women and communities of color could now shape laws for decades to come. There’s no way that students, survivors, or anyone impacted by discrimination can trust that they would have a fair hearing in his court. We will continue to fight Trump’s persistent littering of the Courts with extremist, bigoted judges. People across the country deserve better.

People across the country certainly deserve better than this bargain bin Mark Corrigan. But 51 Republicans disagree and are more than happy to dump this bubbling, regressive former clerk of Justice Alito onto the courts, for life.