Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) lashed out at controversial judicial nominee Steven Menashi, whom President Trump has tapped for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, on Tuesday, calling the nominee a “bottom crawler.”
Menashi, who cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee last week on a party-line vote, has met with fierce opposition from liberal groups because of his college writings for the conservative Dartmouth Review.
Schumer on Tuesday declared the nominee, who once criticized Take Back the Night marches as anti-men, is completely unacceptable.
{mosads}“He’s a bottom crawler,” Schumer told reporters. “He just does not deserve to be on the bench. Not only in terms of his creating a system that broke the law in taking money away from students in loans but what he said about civil rights, what he said about LGBTQ right.”
“You could hardly come up with a worst person,” Schumer said.
Menashi has come under fire for his work as acting general counsel for Trump’s Department of Education, where he worked on a plan to use Social Security data to limit student debt relief. A federal judge later ruled the use of Social Security data violated students’ privacy.
Menashi has also drawn opposition from Democrats because of his work as a White House lawyer in collaboration with senior adviser Stephen Miller’s Immigration Strategic Working Group.
Groups such as the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights say lawmakers should find out what role Menashi played in developing family-separation and asylum policies.
But it’s his past writings for the Dartmouth Review that have especially outraged his critics.
In a 2001 op-ed, he drew an analogy between affirmative action and the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany for both cataloguing people by race.
Schumer on Tuesday slammed GOP colleagues for letting Menashi’s nomination advance.
“The fact that every Republican voted for him in the Judiciary Committee when they know how bad he is as a nominee in terms of character is disgraceful,” Schumer said.