Trump’s MAGA makeover of the Third Circuit is complete

In his first term, Donald Trump appointed four judges to the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit — flipping the court’s ideological balance firmly to the right.

The 14-member court, which hears appeals from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, routinely handles disputes of national importance.

This past summer, it struck down Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballot dating rule, and just last week, it heard arguments over New Jersey’s long-standing assault rifle ban, potentially teeing up the issue for U.S. Supreme Court review.

President Joe Biden had a chance to tip the balance back.

His nominee, Adeel Mangi, would have become the first Muslim American to serve on any federal appellate court. But facing bad-faith Republican attacks and tepid Democratic support, Mangi’s nomination was left to die on the Senate floor.

That failure, and Trump’s return to power, cleared the way for the rapid installation of two MAGA loyalists, Emil Bove and Jennifer Mascott, cementing an 8-6 conservative majority.

Less than a year into his second term, Trump has finished what he started in his first. His MAGA makeover of the Third Circuit is complete — and the people of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, and perhaps the country as a whole, will be living with its consequences for decades to come.

Trump’s first pick for the Third Circuit is also his most dangerous: Emil Bove.

Bove, the president’s former criminal defense attorney, lacks the culture war credentials required of nearly every other Trump judicial nominee. He never sued the Biden administration, or opposed same-sex marriage, or defended a state abortion ban. But he has one quality in spades: loyalty to Donald Trump.

Once installed in the U.S. Department of Justice, Bove wasted little time proving to Trump that he would do whatever it took to advance Trump’s agenda.

He fired the federal prosecutors and FBI agents who pursued cases against the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists. He clumsily sought to dismiss charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams to coerce him to aid Trump’s immigration crackdown. And, according to multiple credible whistleblower allegations, Bove told other DOJ lawyers that if courts tried to stop the administration’s deportations, they should tell “the courts ‘fuck you.’”

Now that Bove is on the Third Circuit — he was confirmed in July by a razor-thin 50-49 vote — he is moving with similar speed to show Trump he’s still on his side.

This week, in what appears to be Bove’s first vote as a circuit judge, he joined four other Trump appointees dissenting from the full court’s decision to deny the request of various Republican organizations to rehear the case holding Pennsylvania’s date requirement for mail-in ballots unconstitutional.

Of course, there never should have been a vacancy for Bove to fill.

Back in November 2023, President Biden nominated Mangi to the seat Bove now holds. Mangi had all the sterling credentials you’d expect from an appellate court nominee — degrees from Oxford and Harvard Law, and a long career at a white-shoe law firm.

But all Republicans could see was that he was Muslim, and they pulled out every Islamophobic trick in their very big book to disingenuously paint him as some antisemitic radical.

And what’s worse, some Senate Democrats fell for it, sinking Mangi’s nomination and handing this critical vacancy to Trump.

Over the summer, Trump also nominated Catholic University law professor Jennifer Mascott to a second Third Circuit vacancy in Delaware.

Mascott’s résumé is dripping with connections to Trump and the MAGA legal movement. She clerked for then-D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh (one of Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court) and Justice Clarence Thomas (one of Trump’s favorite justices).

Before joining Catholic Law last year, she taught at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, one of the most conservative in the country.

In the first Trump administration, she worked in Trump’s Justice Department and helped with Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s last-minute confirmation.

This time, she went to work directly for Trump as senior counselor to the president in the White House Counsel’s Office.

What Mascott lacks, however, is any genuine connection to Delaware.

She lives in Maryland and works in Washington, D.C. She is not admitted to the Delaware Bar, and she has little, if any, experience with Delaware’s sophisticated corporate law regime.

But Mascott admitted in her Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire that she made clear to Trump that she was willing to take any judgeship in which he “would be interested in having [her] serve,” historical tradition and judicial propriety be damned.

Even the timing of her confirmation reeks of political gamesmanship.

Mascott leapfrogged a half dozen other judicial nominees so she could join the Third Circuit in time to participate, and potentially cast the deciding vote, in a major Second Amendment case about New Jersey’s assault weapons ban.

Right-wing litigants know they’ll find sympathetic ears in Philadelphia.

With Bove and Mascott now seated, the Third Circuit may become the venue of choice for Trump’s allies looking to legitimize his most extreme policies, as right-wing litigants know they’ll find sympathetic ears in Philadelphia.

What was once a court known for its independence and moderation could soon become a proving ground for Trump’s legal movement — a place where loyalty trumps the law.

The only question left is how long it will take before the rest of the country starts feeling the consequences of the Third Circuit’s new MAGA majority.

John P. Collins Jr. is an associate professor at George Washington University Law School, where he researches and writes about federal judicial nominations.