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Arizona officials have certified Joe Biden’s narrow victory over President Donald Trump in the state. Biden won Arizona by 0.3% of the nearly 3.4 million votes cast, a margin of just under 10,500 votes. (November 30)
President-elect Joe Biden has called for bipartisan unity since announcing his candidacy, but objections from conservatives and progressives to his choice to lead the White House’s Office of Management and Budget were probably not not what he had in mind.
Voices from the left and the right protested after Biden announced on Monday he would appoint Neera Tanden, who heads the left-wing Center for American Progress, as budget chief at the same time he officially unveiled more senior members of its business team, including Janet. Yellen, whom he named his Secretary of the Treasury.
While many conservatives ridiculed her for being too liberal, and many liberals dismissed her as too conservative, Tanden appeared to attempt to allay the concerns of these latest critics by indicating that she depended on public agendas. food and shelter as a child and vowed that as director of Elle “would help keep these programs safe.”
Biden’s transition website also showcased her humble journey, saying she “relied on Section 8 food stamps and housing as a child – a social safety net that provided her single mother. the foundation she needed to land a good job and hit her family’s ticket to the middle class. ” And he said his career had “focused on pursuing policies designed to support working families, foster broad-based economic growth and reduce rampant inequalities.”
But such assurances seemed unlikely to sway progressive detractors like Brianna Joy Gray, the former press secretary for Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, who tweeted: “Anything toxic in the Corporate Democratic Party is embodied in Neera Tanden.
Sanders, who is said to be the senior Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee that will hold Tanden’s confirmation hearings, and Tanden have had a strained relationship. Tanden worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, including her hard-fought primary campaign against Vermont independence.
In 2019, Sanders criticized the Center for American Progress’s “destructive role” under Tanden. “Neera Tanden repeatedly calls for unity while slandering my staff and supporters and belittling progressive ideas,” Sanders wrote in a letter.
Gray and others pointed to comments Tanden made during her tenure as former President Barack Obama’s health care reform adviser, where she expressed willingness to include cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in a budget deal with Republicans. Others denounced his opposition to “Medicare for All”.
Not all progressive figures opposed Tanden’s appointment. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said Tanden, along with Biden’s other choices for his business team, was “committed to full employment, raising wages, reducing inequality.”
Senator Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, tweeted, “Neera Tanden is smart, experienced and qualified for the position of Director of OMB.” And he opposed Republican calls to block his nomination, saying, “The American people voted decisively for change – Mitch McConnell shouldn’t stop us from having a functioning government that gets to work for them. people we serve. ”
“I agree,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
“A great choice to lead the OMB,” tweeted Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. “@NeeraTanden will bring the urgently needed experience and humanity to this post. Congratulations!”
Defender of voting rights Stacey Abrams also offered her congratulations.
Many conservatives, who remember her as one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, have said they have no doubts about Tanden’s liberal good faith.
“Neera Tanden is a big government, big spending radical liberal who is a terrible choice for the OMB director,” tweeted Senator Rick Scott, R-Fla. “It’s just more proof that @JoeBiden and Democrats will continue to move further and further to the left.”
Senator Kevin Cramer, RN.D., told the New York Times: “She’s not just a liberal ideologue, she’s a partisan activist who takes on majority party senators. She seems to have chosen one way that does not lead to an office confirmed by the Senate. ”
Senator John Cornyn told reporters Tanden was Biden’s “worst candidate yet” because of the caustic tweets she posted in the recent past.
“I think, in light of his combative and insulting comments on many members of the Senate, mainly on our side of the aisle, that this certainly creates a problematic path,” he said. Earlier Monday, Drew Brandewie, Cornyn’s communications director, said Tanden “has no chance of being confirmed” due to an “endless stream of derogatory comments about Republican senators that she will need from the vote”.
Former Chief of Staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted that Tanden’s appointment was a “sacrifice to the gods of confirmation”.
Senator Lindsey Graham, RS.C. – who is expected to chair the budget committee – told reporters that Tanden’s confirmation could be an “uphill battle”.
Tanden has been very critical of a number of Republican senators under the Trump administration – calling them “facilitators” of the president – including McConnell whom she accused “weakness and recklessness on Russia. ”
A number of tweets appeared to have been deleted from Tanden’s account on Monday night, but according to the Wall Street Journal, she also tweeted once: “I’m glad McConnell is fiddling, while the markets are burning.”
A look at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine showed that the number of tweets under Tanden’s account rose from 88,600 on November 16 to 87,600 on Monday morning. At 8 p.m. EST on Monday, the number of tweets on his account dropped to 87,500.
A Google search for posts on McConnell under his account revealed at least four tweets that were no longer available.
During contentious confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, she accused Senator Susan Collins, R-Maine, of making a “pathetically bad faith argument to cover up President Trump’s vicious attacks on sexual assault survivors.” ”
“She’s the worst,” she said of Collins in another tweet at the time.
Collins told reporters on Monday that she didn’t know much about Tanden, “but I heard she was a very prolific Twitter user.”
And criticism of his Twitter activity extended to the left as well.
Gray said Tanden was “a woman who is openly dismissive of Bernie Sanders and his coalition, but who is friendly with extreme fanatics online.”
Tanden has been a prolific presence on Twitter, posting more than 87,000 tweets since joining in March 2010. By comparison, President Donald Trump has posted nearly 59,000 tweets since joining Twitter a year before Tanden.
A number of Tanden supporters dismissed the criticism, saying many of those who condemned his tweets had tolerated much worse from Trump.
“The Republican senators who feared a nasty tweet from Trump now attacking Neera Tanden is a particularly serious case of cowardice,” said Joe Lockhart, White House communications director under former President Bill Clinton.
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