Prior to his confirmation vote, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called Menashi a “disgrace.”

“He showed a breathtaking contempt for senators on both sides of the aisle,” Schumer said. “His record on race, women’s equality, LGBTQ rights and rights of immigrants should be disqualifying.”

But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) defended Menashi and urged the Senate to confirm him.

“Mr. Menashi won majority support from the Judiciary Committee on the basis of strong academic and legal qualifications — degrees from Dartmouth and Stanford, clerkships on the appellate level and the Supreme Court, and experience in both teaching and practicing law,” McConnell said.

In addition to his confirmation hearing performance, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee criticized Menashi last week for a New York Times story reporting that he wrote a plan for the Department of Education to deny debt relief to students cheated by for-profit colleges. A federal judge ruled the plan violated privacy laws.

Menashi also came under fire for his previous writings, which Collins said in a statement last month “raise questions about whether he has the appropriate judicial temperament.” Among those writings was an essay Menashi penned about ethnonationalism and the state of Israel.

He also accused trial lawyers of “feeding on the public for long enough,” in an op-ed in the New York Sun — an article that did not go over well with Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a former trial lawyer. In addition, Menashi described animal rights activists as a “contemptible bunch.”

As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, Menashi criticized “Take Back the Night” marches, which are intended to raise awareness about sexual harassment against women. Menashi wrote that such marches discriminated against men by “[charging] the majority of male students with complicity in rape and sexual violence.”

He also accused the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, of capitalizing on the murder of Matthew Shepard “for both financial and political benefit.” And he criticized universities for collecting data on race, “sixty years after the promulgation of the Nuremberg laws.”

Menashi did have strong backing from conservative groups like the Judicial Crisis Network, which described Democratic attacks against Menashi as “baseless smears.”

