Senate Confirms Judge Who Republicans Attacked For... Writing A Corny Poem
WASHINGTON — The Senate voted Tuesday to confirm Mustafa Kasubhai to be a federal judge, putting an end to Republicans’ baseless accusations that he is a Marxist because of a cheesy love poem he wrote decades ago as a student.
Kasubhai was confirmed 51 to 44.
President Joe Biden tapped Kasubhai, 54, for a lifetime seat on the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. He has been a magistrate judge on this court since 2018. Before that, he was a county judge from 2007 to 2018.
Like they’ve done with a number of Biden’s court picks, Republicans baselessly tried to cast Kasubhai as a left-wing extremist.
During his confirmation hearing in Oct. 2023, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked him outright if he was a Marxist, which he denied. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said he had evidence to the contrary: a love poem Kasubhai wrote more than 30 years ago as a law school student, called “Sensualized Property Theory.”
And then, to the horror of anyone who’s ever taken a stab at writing poetry, but especially to Kasubhai, Cruz read the whole poem aloud.
“Intimate knowing, the lovers kissed, familiar and ever-exciting, passionate transcendence beyond the physical exhilaration lies a burning light and our limbs are hearts. Floating, flying, falling in every direction, amorphous and wonderful, time-stretching, space-curving, exquisitely explosive eros, and yet, I timidly tremble every time,” the GOP senator read.
He paused briefly as he struggled to understand the poem’s deeper meaning: “Now, somehow this is about property, which is not immediately evident as to why.”
And then Cruz just kept reading.
“Property is not simply a relationship between an owner and an object of ownership,” he continued, citing Kasubhai’s comparisons of philosophers John Locke, Jeremy Bentham and Karl Marx. “The process towards integrating all three may provide a framework for relationships that enhances each unique self. The aspiration towards intimate knowing — the intimate knowing of one’s self and others — is a creative struggle towards redefining property.”
Cruz demanded to know: “What the hell does that mean?”
“The poetry was definitely not good,” Kasubhai said softly.
After being interrogated for a while longer, the Oregon magistrate judge finally pointed Cruz to his long record on the court as proof of his qualifications.
“In the context of the work that I do on the bench, senator, when you look at my record for all of these 16 years, you’ll find that I have upheld the Constitution and case precedent,” Kasubhai said.
That wasn’t the only absurd attack Kasubhai faced. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a member of the committee, mocked Kasubhai for his practice of giving people in his courtroom a chance to introduce themselves and note their honorifics and pronouns ― if they wanted to.
“Mustafa Kasubhai, who makes the people who come before his court announce their pronouns,” Kennedy wrote on social media last Thursday, linking to a clip of himself asking Kasubhai about this in his hearing.
The Oregon judge calmly answered Kennedy’s questions, saying he created a cheat sheet so ”everybody who comes before the court can be acknowledged and identified in dignified ways.”
Then Kasubhai simply moved on.
“Your poetry has been fed back to you today,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the committee chairman, told the judge at the end of his hearing.
“Don’t be discouraged,” he said. “Poetry is still very important.”
Lena Zwarensteyn, senior director of the fair courts program at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, hailed Kasubhai’s “long-awaited confirmation.” She noted he is the first Asian American and first Muslim to serve in a lifetime judicial appointment on this court.
“Judge Kasubhai possesses significant experience defending and protecting the rights of working people and, as a fair-minded magistrate judge, has been deeply committed to equity, inclusion, and fairness in his courtroom,” Zwarensteyn said in a Tuesday statement.
Kusabhai has been waiting for his Senate confirmation vote for nearly a year, and the main reason he was confirmed at all is because a number of Republicans were absent on Tuesday. In this narrowly divided Senate, even a couple of missing GOP votes can make a difference.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has been moving quickly to confirm as many of Biden’s judicial nominees as possible in the lame duck, before Republicans retake control of the chamber in January.
He teed up votes on nine of Biden’s district court picks on Monday night, after keeping senators in late to confirm other judges. He also warned senators to prepare for a late night of voting on Wednesday.
“We’ll keep working to confirm these lifetime appointments,” Schumer told reporters Tuesday. “It’s far too important. We’re not going to let anything stand in our way.”
