John Kennedy's red baiting worked

[iemanja]

Saule Omarova has withdrawn her nomination for Comptroller of the Currency. I hate to see their duplicitous behavior rewarded.

During Omarova’s confirmation hearing last month, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) had suggested that her upbringing in Soviet-controlled Kazakhstan indicated a possible Communist loyalty.

. . .

But her nomination was fraught for other reasons. Senate Republicans were expected to oppose her confirmation unanimously, meaning a single Democratic defection in the evenly divided chamber would have sunk her bid.

A handful of moderate Senate Democrats had expressed concerns about Omarova’s views, and private meetings with her did not appear to have assuaged them.

“Some of Dr. Omarova’s past statements about the role of government in the financial system raise real concerns about her ability to impartially serve at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and I’m looking forward to discussing them with her at her hearing,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), a member of the Banking Committee, said in a statement last month.

Responding to the news of her withdrawal, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) blamed “powerful interests” for launching a “relentless smear campaign reminiscent of red scare McCarthyism” against her. “I am disappointed that these spurious attacks and misrepresentations of Professor Omarova’s views were not resoundingly rejected in a bipartisan manner,” Brown said in a statement.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/12/07/saule-omarova-bidens-pick-top-bank-regulator-withdraws-nomination/

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Kennedy is the biggest

elitist asshole there is . . .

[BlueTsunami2018]

2. The bad guys win again.

And with help from “our” side.

[gratuitous]

3. So that whole "The President is entitled to choose his own people" piety was insincere?

Knock me over with a feather! Trump could nominate the most incompetent, conflicted, and compromised candidates for positions in his administration, and Senate Republicans didn't bat an eye. We were lectured time and again that the President is entitled to choose anyone he wants to serve anywhere he wants. The popular media played along with that as if it were true, and not howlingly hypocritical.

Saule Omarova is smeared by flaming hypocrite Sen. Kennedy, and Sen. Tester falls right in line with his outrageous bigotry. Nice job, Jon.

[iemanja]

4. It's infuriating

[Carlitos Brigante]

7. "The President is entitled to choose his own people.... as long as I'm cool with it." is what they

mean.

[tritsofme]

5. I hate so much that he has that name.

[Celerity]

6. Tester is channelling his inner Manchin, first the Biden vax mandate, now this Biden nomination

[Celerity]

8. she had great ideas too, ones that the giant banksters hated

In a 2020 paper titled “The People’s Ledger,” Omarova proposed the Federal Reserve provide consumer banking services as a “cheaper and more efficient alternative” to deposit accounts offered by private banks. In another, she called for installing a government representative on the board of any banking institution deemed big enough to pose a potential risk to the broader financial system. Those papers and others drew an uncharacteristically fierce campaign against her nomination from the banking industry.

THE PEOPLE’S LEDGER: HOW TO DEMOCRATIZE MONEY AND FINANCE THE ECONOMY

https://lpeproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Peoples.Ledger.DRAFT_.pdf

INTRODUCTION

This Article is both a reform proposal and a thought experiment. It is an
attempt to come to terms with powerful forces reshaping today’s finance:
technological disruption, macroeconomic imbalances, and political demands
for broader access to financial services. These forces are redefining how we
use and understand money, payments, investments—and what we expect
from banks, central banks, and lawmakers entrusted with our collective
wellbeing. From a public policy perspective, this ongoing transformation
is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it renders familiar tools of monetary policy and financial
regulation increasingly obsolete and ineffectual. On the other hand, it offers
a unique opportunity to correct the inequities and inefficiencies built into
the core structures of modern finance. In this sense, the current convergence
of deep technological, economic, and political shifts creates a crucial opening
for redesigning the financial system.

The need for this fundamental restructuring is particularly urgent in light
of the recent COVID-19 experience. In a visceral way, the pandemic exposed
the ultimate human costs of crisis-time malfunctions—and hard-wired
dysfunctions—in the financial system. These dynamics were on full display
in the United States, where the pandemic made not having a basic bank
account an existential threat to millions of poor, disproportionately non-white
Americans.

Containing the COVID crisis thus quickly became a matter not
only of public health but also of financial inclusion, economic justice, and
racial equity. Yet, the federal government’s response followed the old
playbook of saving the economy by propping up financial markets, with
predictably inequitable results. In effect, the pandemic laid bare the
fundamental asymmetry in the operation of the U.S. fiscal and monetary
infrastructure, designed to privilege financial institutions and their corporate
clients over ordinary Americans.

[iemanja]

9. Hence the red baiting

The Banksters but Kennedy up to it, and of course he obliged in a grotesque manner.

[Celerity]

10. they lean on many, not just Rethugs

Look at the Dems who voted to partially further gut an already watered-down Dodd-Frank.


Congress Approves First Big Dodd-Frank Rollback

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/business/congress-passes-dodd-frank-rollback-for-smaller-banks.html

“It’s a bad bill under the guise of helping community banks,” Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic minority leader, said during debate on the House floor on Tuesday. “The bill would take us back to the days when unchecked recklessness on Wall Street ignited an historic financial meltdown.”

the 17 Dems who voted to roll it back (in bold went on to lose, italics are shaky for 2022 or 2024)

Bennet (D-CO)
Carper (D-DE)
Coons (D-DE)
Donnelly (D-IN)
Hassan (D-NH) 2022
Heitkamp (D-ND)
Jones (D-AL)
Kaine (D-VA)
King (I-ME)
Manchin (D-WV) 2024
McCaskill (D-MO)
Nelson (D-FL)
Peters (D-MI)
Shaheen (D-NH)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Tester (D-MT) 2024
Warner (D-VA)