Smearing Steven Menashi CNN and MSNBC distort another judicial nominee’s views. By The Editorial Board
https://www.wsj.com/articles/smearing-steven-menashi-11566761235
The Trump Administration is nominating more federal judges, and right behind comes the character assassination. The latest target is Steven Menashi, a highly regarded appellate lawyer who was acting general counsel in Betsy DeVos ’ Department of Education and now works in the White House counsel’s office. He was tapped this month for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
Progressive groups have been orchestrating a smear campaign in coordination with their media allies. Rachel Maddow opened the assault this month with a MSNBC monologue suggesting Mr. Menashi is a white nationalist. Her evidence? A 2010 article Mr. Menashi wrote for a University of Pennsylvania international-law journal that defended Israel as a liberal democracy and Jewish state.
Some on the left argue that Israel’s “right of return” immigration law for Jews is illegitimate because it excludes other groups. Mr. Menashi disputed this by describing comparable laws in Germany, Greece and Finland, which have welcomed back displaced nationals. He noted countries like India and Ireland take a special interest in their ethnic diasporas, and that this doesn’t diminish their democracies.
Ms. Maddow said this amounts to a “high-brow argument for racial purity.” After all, Mr. Menashi drew on that noted herrenvolk theorist Hannah Arendt, the Jewish chronicler of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial, who once wrote that human rights “has been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights.”
Nation states often have an ethnic, linguistic and cultural basis. But Ms. Maddow said Mr. Menashi is on the “fringe of racial thinking.” If Senators take her seriously, they will confirm how far they have drifted to the anti-Israel fringe.
Next came the spelunkers at CNN, which is outraged by Mr. Menashi’s writings as a college student. He was editor of the Dartmouth Review and wrote for the paper regularly. A centerpiece of the hit is that Mr. Menashi in 2001 “accus[ed] a major LGBTQ group of exploiting the brutal murder of a gay student for political ends.”
CNN doesn’t mention that Mr. Menashi was building on the argument of Andrew Sullivan, the gay-marriage advocate, who had recently argued in the New Republic that the Human Rights Campaign was emphasizing the Matthew Shepard murder in its campaign for a federal hate-crimes law while ignoring a comparable slaying by two gay men in 1999. Mr. Menashi said identity politics leads to a tendency to place a differential value on human lives that should be resisted. He was right.
CNN further assails Mr. Menashi for having “defended a fraternity that threw a ‘ghetto party,’ widely seen as racist” in 1998. Mr. Menashi is not accused of participating in the party, but rather for arguing that campus liberal monoculture pressures students to exaggerate harm from offensive speech.
In one of the pieces CNN dredged up, Mr. Menashi pointed to the Dartmouth College handbook, which said, “Protest or demonstration shall not be discouraged so long as neither force nor the threat of force is used.” If only more judges understood First Amendment principles so well so young.
President Trump is nominating conservatives to be judges, just as the next Democratic Administration will nominate liberals. Democrats are setting a precedent of politicizing everything nominees have said or done even into their adolescent years. This politics of personal destruction is perilous for the judiciary, and Republican Senators would validate it if they oppose Mr. Menashi.
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