BIDEN APPOINTEES OF COLOR FACING MORE OPPOSITION FROM THE SENATE

By rmrd0000 on Wed, 02/24/2021 - 10:24am |

Joe Biden’s Nominees Of Color Are Facing Outsize Opposition

Manchin mansplains his opposition to Tanden

A number of President Joe Biden’s nominees of color are facing opposition in the Senate, and their increasingly frustrated supporters are mobilizing against the harsher scrutiny these nominees have faced compared to their white counterparts.

This week, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) threw the confirmation of Neera Tanden into doubt when he said he would oppose her to lead the Office of Management and Budget, arguing that her history of caustic tweets made her too “toxic.” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) similarly said Tanden’s tweets make her unqualified for the role. “Neera Tanden has neither the experience nor the temperament to lead this critical agency,” Collins said in a statement.

Tanden, the former president of the Center for American Progress, is the first Asian American woman nominated to lead the agency, and she would be one of the most high-profile Asian Americans in the Biden administration. But Democrats have a wafer-thin majority in the Senate, and essentially need every member of the caucus to stay unified in order to get Biden’s nominees through. So far, no Republican senator has indicated their support for Tanden.

Tanden’s tweets have taken aim at both the left and the right and earned her plenty of detractors. But she’s not the first nominee to have a social media trail. In 2018, the Senate approved Richard Grenell to be Donald Trump’s ambassador to Germany, even though he had a long history of posting rude and sexist messages on Twitter.

Manchin voted to approve Grenell. On Tuesday, he said the difference between the two was a matter of timing. After the Capitol riot on Jan. 6 ― which was carried out by Trump supporters ― Manchin said he believed the country now “can’t have that type of animosity.”

 

URL: 

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-nominees-of-color-opposition_n_...

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From the HuffPost article

Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), vice chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, told HuffPost that if Tanden’s nomination doesn’t go through, it would be a huge blow to the Asian American community. She’s also worried that nominees of color are facing a different level of scrutiny.

“Are we changing the standards depending on who the nominee is and who they look like, and are we moving the goalposts on what makes a nominee qualified?” she asked. “These are questions that I had.”

On Monday, nearly 30 influential gender and labor advocates, from organizations including the AFL-CIO and the National Women’s Law Center, signed a letter emphasizing Tanden’s qualifications.

“Neera is a strong, powerful woman with deep convictions, and someone who is not afraid to say what she thinks,” said Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at the think tank New America who signed the letter supporting Tanden. “I don’t think she should be held to a different standard than what others with those same qualities have been held to.”

For now, it appears the White House is still standing by Tanden. When a CBS reporter asked Biden on Tuesday whether he still has confidence in Tanden, the president said: “We’re going to push. We still think there’s a shot, a good shot.”

Several other Biden nominees of color are facing questions and potential complications.

“If it was just Tanden, I’d say her circumstances are sufficiently unusual that we might not want to generalize. But it’s not just her,” said Jennifer Lawless, a political science professor at the University of Virginia and an expert in gender and politics. “If you’ve got a handful of nominees who are either women or people of color systematically experiencing more hurdles and doubt than white men going through the confirmation process, that raises a flag.”

“That’s sexism and racism,” she added.