'No Longer Tenable': Biden's Radical Pick for Key Position Is Officially Out
A big step toward socialism just got stopped in its tracks — but what comes next is what’s really important.
Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s radical nominee for comptroller of the United States currency, withdrew herself from consideration for the job after a Republican campaign highlighted just how unsuitable her ideas made her for an important role in the American economy.
Now, the country has to see what Biden has planned next, since he clearly hasn’t learned his lesson.
From the time her nomination was announced, Omarova was targeted by Republicans for past writings and statements that proposed a federal takeover of key parts of the private banking sector, driving American energy companies out of business, and basically turning the government’s power to destroying the kind of capitalist system that made the country great in the first place.
She was a Democrat’s dream, of course. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren called her nomination “tremendous news” in a September tweet.
But for Republicans, conservatives and anyone who really cares about the country, she was a nightmare.
With Republican senators united in their opposition, even some Democrats from purple states were shaky in their support. Axios reported in late November that Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Jon Tester of Montana and Mark Warner of Virginia had told the Biden White House they couldn’t support Omarova.
In the face of all that pressure, Omarova withdrew.
With their usual disregard for intellectual honesty, some leftier Democrats and their allies in the establishment media tried to brand opposition to Omarova as some kind of xenophobic, knee-jerk reaction to a woman who grew up in Kazakhstan, a republic of the former Soviet Union.
As The New York Times put it: “Bank lobbyists and Republicans painted her as a communist because she was born in the Soviet Union.”
Saule Omarova, a Cornell Law professor whom President Biden picked for a key banking regulator job, is withdrawing from consideration for the post. Bank lobbyists and Republicans painted her as a communist because she was born in the Soviet Union. https://t.co/90ShBjM5WX
— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 7, 2021
That’s a lie, and anyone who followed Omarova’s nomination knows it. (Of course, a lie from The New York Times isn’t really news.)
Where Omarova was born is irrelevant.
Plenty of people are born into communist tyranny and come to the U.S. without bringing along adherence to failed ideologies of state control over the individual. The Cuban expatriate community in Florida is a good example of that. And so many in that community support Republicans because they know what communism did to the island.
(According to a Pew report from 2020, 58 percent of Cuban-Americans who are registered voters are Republicans. Among Hispanics as a whole, the registration advantage is in the Democratic direction — to the tune of 65 percent.)
And then there are those who escape Islamic fascism and come to the West without bringing religious tyranny with them: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Somali refugee who became a Dutch lawmaker, for instance. She’s now living in the U.S. as a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution.
Individuals like that, and their advancement, are always welcome in the U.S. Few believe in freedom more than those who’ve experienced oppression.
And few are more willing to throw it away than modern American leftists — as evidenced by the overwhelming support for the Times’ leftist take on Twitter. Fortunately, some commenters saw the truth.
Her birthplace was not the issue
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) December 8, 2021
No because of what she said. She argued that the US Government should have a seat on the board of every bank and other systemically important corporations.
— B. (@IrishHawk824) December 7, 2021
Uh, she wanted to nationalize the banks. But sure, go with the fake news headline
— Adam Klein (@stellamydog) December 8, 2021
Regrettably, but not surprisingly, Biden’s statement on Omarova’s withdrawal missed, or ignored, the point of the opposition to her, seeming to buy the Times’ line that there was something personal involved — with a hint of implied racism, of course.
“As a strong advocate for consumers and a staunch defender of the safety and soundness of our financial system, Saule would have brought invaluable insight and perspective to our important work on behalf of the American people,” the statement said.
“But unfortunately, from the very beginning of her nomination, Saule was subjected to inappropriate personal attacks that were far beyond the pale.”
It’s not “beyond the pale” for Americans to question a potential government official who, as recently as October 2020, as a professor at Cornell Law School, used a Vanderbilt Law Review article to propose moving private finances into some government-controlled entity called a “people’s ledger.” (The coronavirus pandemic made a nice cover for the discussion.)
It’s not “beyond the pale” for Americans to want to thwart a government nominee who declared in a seminar in March of this year that coal and oil companies need to go bankrupt “if we want to tackle climate change.”
Biden nominee Saule Omarova saying the quiet part out loud. On the oil, coal and gas industries:
“We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change.” pic.twitter.com/luMR2HEMK9
— BidenNoms, A Project of AAF (@bidennoms) November 9, 2021
For leftists in the government and the establishment media, opposition to Omarova was based on the accident of her birth in a communist empire. For Omarova, that opposition made her continued candidacy for comptroller of the currency “no longer tenable.”
They’re all wrong.
The opposition was based on her ideas expressed in the here and now, not on some long-ago forced indoctrination. And it’s not that her suitability for the position is “no longer tenable.”
In a free country, it was never tenable in the first place.
From initial appearances, it seems the Biden administration doesn’t understand what went wrong — or, more likely, is deliberately distorting the truth.
The Omarova ordeal is one more reason, if sane Americans need one, to use next year’s midterms to take power out of the hands of the Democratic Party in both houses of Congress.
To stop the left’s creeping march toward socialism, that’s the biggest step of all.
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