Joe Biden has withdrawn Sarah Bloom Raskin, his nominee for a post at the Federal Reserve, after several Senators objected to her nomination, including Democrats Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema.
Raskin was nominated to be vice chair for supervision at the Fed, a watchdog that oversees Wall Street. But it was her controversial views on climate change that doomed her candidacy.
Raskin has been a proponent of putting a greater focus on the financial fallout of climate change, writing last September that regulators should “ask themselves how their existing instruments can be used to incentivize a rapid, orderly, and just transition away from high-emission and biodiversity-destroying investments.” Republicans such as Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania expressed fear that she might pursue measures that would make it more expensive for banks to lend to oil companies.
Moderate Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski concluded that they couldn’t support Raskin either, making Senate approval an impossibility.
Biden blamed “baseless attacks from industry and conservative interest groups” for his stinging defeat.
Raskin, whom the president tapped to be the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, faced fierce resistance from the oil and gas industry over her position on how the central bank should do more to help tackle climate change. Her nomination had been stuck in the Senate Banking Committee after a GOP boycott of a vote, effectively blocking her confirmation from advancing to the floor of the chamber.
Raskin was a former Fed governor and deputy Treasury secretary during the Obama administration. But threatening to throttle the domestic oil industry in the midst of soaring gas prices marked her as just one more nutty, radical nominee by Joe Biden.
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Biden has given us a few other radical nominees that the Senate wisely opposed so strongly that the president was forced to withdraw their names from consideration.
Neera Tanden, President Biden’s controversial nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, was forced to withdraw after some extraordinarily partisan tweets directed at Republican members of Congress came to light.
Tanden had served as head of the Center for American Progress, an economic think tank, when she issued her tweets, among them calling Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., “Voldemort,” the Harry Potter villain; labeling Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, as “the worst;” and saying that “Vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz,” the Republican senator from Texas. She was also critical of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and some of his supporters.
Joe Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency, Saule Omarova, grew up in the old Soviet Union and attended that bastion of capitalist learning, Moscow State University. She also had several ideas that she herself described as “radical.
“I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade,” Sen. John Kennedy offered prior to her confirmation hearing.
What’s more troubling? A nominee that favors nationalizing America’s banks or a president who actually thinks that someone who believes such a thing would be qualified for high office?
Perhaps most problematic of all was the nomination of David Chipman to head up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Shipman didn’t think that the plain language of the Second Amendment meant exactly what it said.
Chipman isn’t your run-of-the-mill anti-gun Democrat, but rather he is especially condescending toward gun owners and screams contempt for them at every opportunity. He publicly ridicules gun owners, famously mocking, “…the people who hoarded guns might decide six months from now—once they see no zombies around but they’ve run out of tuna and beef jerky—that they need the money to buy food.” Never mind the fact that his counterparts in the Democrat party continue to beat the “defund the police” drum and have stood by as anarchists sack our cities with impunity. When it comes to solutions to skyrocketing crime rates, the only clear message Democrats have for Americans is: You’re on your own.
There will be more radical nominees, largely because anyone with an ounce of common sense has already abandoned Biden and wouldn’t serve in his administration.
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