There is a big difference between the online invective of the former president and that of Biden’s budget-office nominee.
I can’t get whipped up about Neera Tanden. Her nasty tweets about some of the senators to whom she has now come, hat in hand, seeking confirmation, did not leave much of a mark on their targets. But barring something unexpected, they will doom her nomination to be President Biden’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. Already, Senate committees have postponed the vote on Tanden.
Political differences aside, no one doubts Tanden’s competence. The issue is her temperament (and it’s not limited to her Twitter persona). She headed the Center for American Progress, which is a very effective and influential think-tank on the left — very ideological and partisan in the Clinton-Obama mold. Obviously, whoever runs OMB is going to be implementing President Biden’s policy, not her own (to the limited extent there may be differences). Within reason, there should be a presumption in favor of a president’s nominees for executive positions, provided they are not corrupt and have demonstrated competence in the subject matter they’re being appointed to manage.
In the final analysis, though, this is a political determination for the Senate. If you’re going to clown it up in the circus, as Tanden chose to do, then appointment to a position requiring Senate confirmation is never going to be a lay-up — especially in the world that Democrats, very much including Tanden, have made, where the confirmation process is a living hell for Republicans, whose base understandably expects something other than unilateral disarmament.
As old hands, Biden and Tanden are well aware of all this. That is why many of us suspected all along that Tanden was more a sacrificial lamb than a serious nominee. At the time she was named, it still looked like Republicans would win at least one of the Georgia seats, retain control of the Senate, and be poised to reject Biden nominees. Tanden was thus nominated with the thought that if the Republicans got an easy win in the confirmation battles, there would be less ardor in their opposition to other Biden nominees.
But then Democrats won both Georgia seats, positioning them to ram Biden’s nominees through if they just could hold together. It is a measure of how obnoxious Tanden has been that, even with this home-cooking, her nomination is in deep trouble.
In a last ditch effort to save her appointment, the media-Democrat complex now whines that Republicans are hypocrites: Having put up with years of President Trump’s nonstop vituperation — streams of tweets that were sometimes not just vicious but also crazy — how dare they oppose a qualified nominee over boorish behavior on Twitter, etc., etc. Chiming in on this score is Senator Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), the majority leader: “For Republicans to look the other way with the nastiest of tweets by their president, their leader, for now to say Neera Tanden shouldn’t get in because of her tweets is a little bit of a contradiction.”
No, actually, it’s not even a little bit of a contradiction.
Put aside that Republicans are not in a position to stop Tanden — if Schumer could hold his caucus together, she’d be confirmed. The problem is that Trump, like Schumer, was an elected officeholder. He’d never have stood a chance at being appointed to a position requiring Senate confirmation. Indeed, if he could not rely on New Yorkers electing him, Schumer himself would have a tough time getting through a confirmation process at this point, especially after crossing the incitement line (as newly defined by Democrats in the last Trump impeachment) by threatening Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh in an unhinged speech outside the Supreme Court.
Elected officials are installed by the voters, not the pols. They do not depend on Washington’s indulgence to wield power. They may not be popular with most people, but as long as they are elected by their constituents — as long as a relative handful of, say, Californians and Minnesotans keep sending Maxine Waters and Ilhan Omar back to Congress — the rest of us have to put up with their lunatic rants.
If Neera Tanden ever decides to seek elective office rather than content herself with being an effective behind-the-scenes operative, there are any number of blue states and districts in which her trail of tweets would be more of an asset than a liability. An appointment, however, is a different gig. If you’re going to make yourself beholden to a crowd as self-regarding as United States senators, the idea is to ingratiate them; calling them Voldemort, criminally ignorant, and more heartless than a vampire is probably not the way to go.