Aside from Xavier Becerra, no Cabinet nominee of President Biden faces as much of an uphill battle for confirmation as Neera Tanden. Before her nomination to direct the Office of Management and Budget has even left committee, the Center for American Progress has been forced to address her appalling Twitter behavior, which rivaled even the former president that she loathed so much.
"I deeply regret and apologize for my language and some of my past language," Tanden told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "I know I have to earn the trust of senators across the board."
An apology is all fine and dandy, but the problem with Tanden isn't the tweets. It's the person.
Any Democrat who calls Susan Collins, the most centrist Republican in the Senate, "the worst," is not a person capable of following Biden's call to unity and civility. And Tanden's problems go deeper than just the fact that she spent the last several years starting Twitter flame-wars in a manner that could be deemed unprofessional.
For starters, there's that time when she retaliated against an employee who had the audacity to report sexual harassment by outing her at a company-wide meeting. Then there's the fact that she's a deranged conspiracy theorist who has blamed everything from Hillary Clinton's loss to Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement on Russia.Tweet
She didn't even spell Deutsche Bank right in the process of airing this kooky conspiracy theory.
Throw in the fact that she's a corporate sellout pretending to care about cracking down on corporations and that she once assaulted a journalist for asking Clinton about the Iraq War (Tanden maintains she merely "pushed" him), and it's pretty clear Tanden lacks the temperament, manners, and self-control to manage the federal budget.
But moreover, and most importantly, Tanden isn't qualified for the job.
All of Barack Obama's confirmed OMB directors either had prior experience at the OMB or the Council of Economic Advisers or in the banking industry. Mick Mulvaney, former President Donald Trump's OMB director, was a businessman before becoming a crucial player on spending and financial matters in Congress.
In contrast, Tanden's pre-CAP work was all about campaigning and work on healthcare, not budgetary work or economics.
Elections have consequences, and Republicans cannot simply stonewall Biden's entire staffing process. But this attempt to put such a partisan hack in charge of our nation's budget cries out for strenuous opposition. It would be a travesty to allow her to be confirmed. The GOP would be wise to make Tanden's nomination a hill to die on.
