Joe Biden’s nominee for the position of Comptroller of the Currency ran into a brick wall of opposition, but not from Republicans.
The small group of centrist Democrats who hold the whip hand in the Senate torpedoed the nomination of Saule Omarova, a law professor at Cornell University. Ms. Omarova was born in Khazakstan in the old Soviet Union and was educated at that bastion of liberal democracy, Moscow State University in the 1980s.
It wasn’t that she’s a suspected Communist that caused some Democrats to balk. That kind of red-baiting went out of fashion 40 years ago, although some of her policy prescriptions sound sort of Marx-like.
It’s not that she wants the federal government to take over banks, although, at times, she sounds as if that would be A-OK with her.
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It’s not even that she wants smaller oil and gas companies to go bankrupt — although she actually said that.
Mr. Tester also pressed her at the hearing over remarks she made earlier this year calling for smaller oil-and-gas companies to go bankrupt to aid the U.S. in tackling climate change.
Ms. Omarova responded to Mr. Tester at the hearing by saying she misspoke and that her remarks weren’t well-framed. “My intention was…exactly the opposite,” she said. “We need to help those companies to get restructured.”
Oh my, she needs to take a course in how to lie in Washington. That is the absolute worst example of lying under oath ever seen. “Restructured” instead of destroyed? C’mon, man!
This woman has a future in Democratic politics.
Ms. Omarova’s defenders include liberal-leaning Democrats such as Mr. Brown and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. They say she is an accomplished banking expert who will stand up to the industry. The senators say that Washington regulators have been too deferential to big banks in recent years and that Ms. Omarova would work to make the financial system more inclusive for consumers.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is an independent bureau of the Treasury Department. It oversees about 1,200 banks with total assets of $14 trillion, about two-thirds of the total in the U.S. banking system.
Warren thinks it would be “banking reform” to let the Federal Reserve assume a much larger role in consumer banking. It’s an extremely questionable policy — unless someone wanted a quick and dirty way to seize the assets of individual Americans.
But no one would ever think of doing that, right?
How radical a nominee was Saule Omarova? When five Democratic Senators oppose one nominee, you know that Biden has to go back to the drawing board and find some other way to appease the radicals.
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