- Neera Tanden Twitter Account
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- Neera Tanden Twitter Comments
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Twitter is on the verge of taking down Neera Tanden's Cabinet nomination Twitter is on the verge of taking down Neera Tanden's Cabinet nomination How a TikTok video helped these college students. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. WASHINGTON — Neera Tanden, you might have heard, has a Twitter problem. Tanden, President Biden’s choice to run the Office of Management and Budget, has a yearslong trail of problematic tweets.
WASHINGTON—President-elect Joe Biden’s plan to nominate Neera Tanden to head the Office of Management and Budget is already stirring tensions on Capitol Hill, where Republicans say her past comments will threaten her confirmation and undercut the new president’s pledge to calm political waters.
Ms. Tanden, currently the head of the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank, has become an early lightning rod in Mr. Biden’s rollout of his team in part due to comments she has made on Twitter. She has used the platform to regularly criticize President Trump and Republican lawmakers, including floating allegations involving Russia, while also tussling with the left wing of the Democratic Party.
Republicans began expressing their concerns over the weekend after The Wall Street Journal reported she was the pick. Josh Holmes, an adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), referred to her nomination on Twitter as a “sacrifice to the confirmation gods.”
“I think in light of her combative and insulting comments about many members of the Senate, mainly on our side of the aisle, that it creates certainly a problematic path,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) on Monday. He said Republicans were willing to work with Mr. Biden, but Ms. Tanden “strikes me as maybe his worst nominee so far.”
It wasn’t known if the pushback would endanger the pick, as senators returned to Washington on Monday.
Neera Tanden Twitter Account
“She’s not just a liberal ideologue, she’s a partisan activist who’s gone after senators of the majority party,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R., N.D.), a member of the Senate’s Budget Committee. “She seems to have chosen a path that doesn’t lead to a Senate confirmed office.”
Mr. Biden will need 51 votes to confirm his nominees. With control of the Senate still in question—Democrats next year will hold at least 48 seats and Republicans will hold at least 50 and there are two runoffs in Georgia—it isn’t clear how many, if any, Republicans Mr. Biden will need to confirm Ms. Tanden. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would break any ties.
Ms. Tanden didn’t respond to requests for comment and a representative from CAP referred questions to the Biden transition team.
Jen Psaki, who will be President-elect Joe Biden’s press secretary, said on Twitter that Ms. Tanden is a “brilliant policy expert and she knows how vital funding for govt programs is…. Her fresh perspective can help meet this moment.”
Ms. Tanden would be the first woman of color and the first South Asian woman to oversee OMB. During Mr. Obama’s administration, Ms. Tanden was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans have repeatedly sought to repeal.
If confirmed this would be Ms. Tanden’s third time serving in a Democratic administration. She was the senior adviser for health reform at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President Obama. She was also an associate director for domestic policy and senior policy adviser to the first lady in the Clinton administration.
In announcing his economic picks on Monday, Mr. Biden said the team comprises “respected and tested groundbreaking public servants who will help the communities hardest hit by Covid-19 and address the structural inequities in our economy.”
In response to an inquiry about the criticism of Ms. Tanden’s nomination, a Biden transition official pointed the Journal to praise of Ms. Tanden from progressive Democrats, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Barbara Lee, and Republican analyst Bill Kristol, a Trump critic.
Ms. Tanden has produced consistent criticism of Republicans during this administration, including calling them “enablers” of President Trump. In March, she tweeted: “I’m glad McConnell is fiddling, while the markets burn.”
During the Supreme Court hearing for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, she wrote: “These Republican male senators sitting in judgment of Dr Ford need to take up knitting,” referring to a key witness, Christine Blasey Ford. She also issued a statement criticizing Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine) for what she called a “pathetically bad faith argument as cover for President Trump’s vicious attacks on survivors of sexual assault.”
Twitter threads indicate that Ms. Tanden has also deleted tweets that involved Ms. Collins and other senators. A comparison of her current tweet count and an archived view of her account from Nov. 16 on the Wayback Machine indicates that Ms. Tanden has deleted about 1,000 tweets from her account since then, but it wasn’t immediately known when any particular tweet was deleted.
Ms. Collins is one of a handful of Republicans who have said they would generally support confirming Mr. Biden’s nominees.
“I did not know her, much about her, but I’ve heard that she’s a very prolific user of Twitter,” Ms. Collins told reporters on Monday. “I really don’t have anything further to say.”
Neera Tanden Twitter Feed
What Did Neera Tanden Tweet
Mr. McConnell didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Tanden also used Twitter to float theories about Mr. Trump and Russian election interference, after Hillary Clinton narrowly lost the 2016 election. “Russians did enough damage to affect more than 70k votes in 3 states,” she tweeted, in a reference to Midwestern states that provided the Electoral College margin of victory to Mr. Trump. She also tweeted in defense of the now-discredited Steele Dossier.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded Russia tried to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election in Mr. Trump’s favor. A later report from special counsel Robert Mueller said he couldn’t establish a conspiracy between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia to interfere in the election.
Ms. Tanden also has critics on the left, though some were lining up behind the nominee.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Ms. Tanden, a longtime adviser to Hillary Clinton, have had a tumultuous relationship since Mr. Sanders ran against Mrs. Clinton in the 2016 presidential primary. Ms. Tanden has tangled with some of Mr. Sanders’s supporters on Twitter and has criticized Mr. Sanders, who ran again for the Democratic nomination this year.
Mr. Sanders is the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, which would oversee Ms. Tanden’s confirmation hearings.
In a 2019 letter, Mr. Sanders accused CAP of playing a destructive role in Democratic efforts to beat President Trump by criticizing multiple Democrats running for president. In the same letter he said Ms. Tanden “repeatedly calls for unity while simultaneously maligning my staff and supporters and belittling progressive ideas.”
Ms. Tanden thanked Mr. Sanders for “his many efforts to unify the party” in a tweet after Mr. Sanders dropped out of the Democratic primary.
A Sanders spokesman declined to comment on how he would vote on the nomination.
Ms. Warren, another progressive who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, will vote for Ms. Tanden, according to spokeswoman Kristen Orthman.
Ms. Warren tweeted “I agree” in response to a tweet from Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, in which he called Ms. Tanden “smart, experienced, and qualified for the position of OMB Director.” He added: “Mitch McConnell shouldn’t block us from having a functioning government that gets to work for the people we serve.”
Write to Eliza Collins at eliza.collins@wsj.com. and Siobhan Hughes at siobhan.hughes@wsj.com
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s choice to the lead the Office of Management and Budget apologized Tuesday for spending years attacking top Republicans on social media as she tried to convince senators she’ll leave partisan politics behind if confirmed.
Neera Tanden also admitted to spending “many months” removing past Twitter posts, saying, “I deleted tweets because I regretted them.” But she refused to say she did so to help her nomination.
“I know there have been some concerns about some of my past language on social media, and I regret that language and take responsibility for it,” Tanden, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton and the president of the center-left Center for American Progress, told a Senate committee.
She later added, “I deeply regret and apologize for my language.”
Tanden would be the first woman of color to lead the OMB. Her nomination requires approval from the Senate, which has moved fairly quickly to pass many of Biden’s choices for powerful posts. That’s despite it being divided 50-50 among Democrats and Republicans and this week grappling with the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.
Democrats hold the majority thanks to the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. None in the party have yet opposed Tanden, meaning she’s likely to ultimately be approved. But Republicans have signaled that the process may trigger a political battle unseen with other Biden nominees, given her history of criticism of GOP lawmakers she’d now have to work with.
Republican Ohio Sen. Rob Portman noted that, despite going back and trying “to cover what you said” by deleting tweets, copious ”harsh” criticism” and “personal attacks about specific senators” endured. He said that included Tanden calling Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton “a fraud” and tweeting that “vampires have more heart” than Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford said Tanden had tweeted more over the past four years than even Trump did.
“Something that this committee’s asked pretty frequently of nominees is, ‘Will you commit to working across the aisle?,’” Lankford said. “And that’s one that we have to ask you a little more blunt than others because it’s been pretty clear that hasn’t been your position in the past.”
Tanden said she recognizes “that this role is a bipartisan role, and I know I have to earn the trust of senators across the board.”
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that Biden remains confident Tanden will get confirmed, but that no one in the administration directed her to apologize to ease the process.
“We certainly did not ask her to make any specific comments in her testimony,” Psaki said.
With the coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc on the economy, Tanden promised that she’d use the post of budget chief to “vigorously enforce my ironclad belief that our government should serve all Americans, regardless of party, in every corner of the country.”
Still, Senate discussion of Tanden’s nomination is likely to center more on her past tweets than her budget priorities. Cotton has said they were “filled with hate.” Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn suggested previously that she’d face “certainly a problematic path” to nomination.
Neera Tanden Twitter Comments
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley offered another potential line of Republican criticism on Tuesday, noting that the Center for American Progress had collected large donations from Wall Street firms and groups associated with major tech firms while Tanden headed it.
“How can you ensure us that you’ll work to see that these Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms don’t exercise undo influence,” Hawley asked, “in the making of government policy and the control of our economy?”
Why Is Neera Tanden Controversial
Tanden replied that she’d called for higher taxes on tech companies and more regulation of Wall Street and major corporate interests because “we should be moving to rebalance power in our economy.”