The Biden Administration

[LFC]

This is more about the electoral risks associated with the continuing Trumpifying of the GOP but the poll numbers are interesting. The Mango Manbaby wished he had poll numbers like this.

On Monday, the Associated Press released the results of its latest polling on the new president. Joe Biden enjoys an approval rating of 63 percent over four months. When it comes to his response to the covid, it's even better. Seventy-one percent of Americans give him a thumbs-up, including nearly half of Republicans (47 percent). The survey also "shows an uptick in Americans' overall optimism about the state of the country. Fifty-four percent say the country is on the right track, higher than at any point in AP-NORC polls conducted since 2017; 44 percent think the nation is on the wrong track."

This is one of two polling stories I want to share. The other poll was leaked to the Post over the weekend. A survey of battleground districts, it was conducted by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). Its results were reported during a recent gathering of GOP leadership, but a key part was suppressed. Why? Because it showed support for the former president is much softer than generally believed. "Trump's unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the core districts, according to the full polling results … Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one."

It gets worse: "The internal NRCC poll partially shared with lawmakers in April found that President Biden was perilously popular in core battleground districts, with 54 percent favorability. Vice President Harris was also more popular than Trump, the poll showed. Biden's $1.9 trillion covid stimulus plan and his $2.3 trillion jobs and infrastructure package both polled higher than the former president's favorability, which was at 41 percent, compared to 42 percent in February" (my enthusiastic italics).

I'm the first to tell you to take any individual poll on anything with a healthy grain of salt. These polls in concert, however, suggest something fundamental about our politics. Two things. One, that Donald Trump's grip on the Republican Party may be getting tighter, but not where it's needed most. Two, and more importantly for our collective sanity, that Americans like it when elected officials tell them the whole truth. The former president told tens of thousands of lies. His approval rating never exceeded 50 percent. Biden mostly tells the truth.¹ A majority of Americans now believes the country is headed in the right direction for the first time in four years.

[LFC]

Biden gets another minority female in the DOJ with deep civil rights experienced despite near unanimous Republican opposition.

The Justice Department will get another prominent civil rights attorney added to its leadership, with the Senate, in a 51-48 vote, confirming Kristen Clarke on Tuesday. Clarke has been tapped by President Biden to lead the department’s civil rights division, which is where Clarke started her legal practice as a career attorney in the voting section.

After leaving the department, Clarke worked at civil rights organizations, most recently leading the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. She also did a stint as head of the civil rights division of the New York Attorney General’s office. Over the years, she’s earned acclaim for her handling of hate crimes litigation, voting rights and criminal justice reform.

Clarke’s work spearheading legal challenges to restrictive voting laws made her a target of Republicans during the confirmation process. Only one Republican, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), supported Clarke’s confirmation.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall (paywalled) is worried that Joe Manchin is single-handedly going to take down the adminstration's and the party's entire agenda while whining about wanting bipartisanship that the Republicans will never give him. And the Democrats are going to take the blame for it in 2022, not Manchin personally.

As far as I can tell, no one thinks HR1/S1 is going to be passed in this Congress. Negotiations over a ‘hard’ infrastructure bill currently have a White House proposal of $1.7 trillion and a GOP proposal which, once you wipe away the whip cream and sprinkles, is about $200 billion. And yet negotiations are continuing.

In recent days I see lots of complaints that ‘the Democrats’ are about to blow it on electoral reform, infrastructure and much else. This is wrong. The issue isn’t ‘the Democrats’. It’s a handful of centrist Senate Democrats who simply refuse to use the power at their disposal to pass these laws with 50 votes. In fact, it’s really just Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema and probably at the end of the day just Manchin. The distinction is important because it’s easy to demoralize yourself. It’s easy for a political party to demoralize itself. It’s easy for people who have their own agendas to demoralize people because they think it serves their factional political interests. If you lived through the Obama years and think, ‘wow, did we really not learn this lesson?’ ‘what’s wrong with you people?’ well, that’s going to cause a lot of frustration and make you wonder just who’s calling the shots and what they’re thinking.

But the issue isn’t ‘the Democrats’. It’s Joe Manchin. You don’t have a problem with the Senate Democratic caucus or the House caucus or anyone at the White House. It’s these one or two Senators. And Democrats only have this majority because of their votes. To the extent that these negotiations are dragging on I guarantee you it is part of an effort to keep Manchin and Co on board with an eventual 50 vote strategy. This is all crystal clear. Manchin and Co say they make ‘bipartisanship’ work. So Biden needs to work with them to play that out. Biden just offered a big reduction in his proposed hard infrastructure bill. If Republicans keep responding with total nonstarter proposals, it’s time for Manchin to put up or shut up: produce your reasonable Republicans or support Biden’s bill.

At Vox today Sean Illing has an interview with political scientist David Faris who says Democrats are greatly underestimating the threat of Republicans’ hard move against democracy and majoritarianism and that time is running out. It’s a good interview and I agree with a lot of Faris’s points. But at the end Illing basically poses the question implicit in what I’ve said above. Okay, sure it’s a crisis but what should Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer be doing differently since they need Manchin’s vote. Faris’s response was really unconvincing. It amounted to: just make him do it.

Sean Illing: I’ve had conversations with some Democrats and when these ideas about nuking the filibuster or court-packing or granting statehood to DC and Puerto Rico come up, the argument is often that it’s a nonstarter because Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema simply won’t do it. What’s wrong with that thinking?

David Faris: Certainly the laws that you can pass are contingent on getting the most moderate member of your caucus on board. If Joe Manchin (D-WV) says, “I won’t do $15 minimum wage, I’ll do $12.” Then you’re stuck with $12 or you get nothing. And so that’s a reality.

But I think the problem with this analysis is the assumption that Manchin is an ideological roadblock for progressivism, where he seems to me more of a procedural roadblock to the constitutional hardball that needs to get played here. I mean, he voted for the Covid-19 relief bill, and that was one of the most left-wing things I’ve ever seen come out of Congress. So I don’t actually think that Manchin is that far from the center of the caucus in terms of policy.

Where Manchin seems to be very far away from what House Democrats want to do is on the democracy reform stuff. It’s maddening because nothing that Manchin wants to do policy-wise can get done without abolishing the filibuster. Democrats are not going to have a majority after next year if they don’t do some of these things now. So it’s a mistake to assume Manchin can’t be moved. That’s the job of leadership. That’s Joe Biden’s job. That’s Chuck Schumer’s job.

What this tells me is that Faris doesn’t have any better answer to the question than Biden or Schumer or you or me. Manchin’s agreement to support the relief bill passed through reconciliation doesn’t really tell us anything. It may not make sense on some schematic left-right spectrum that Manchin was flexible there but (so far) inflexible here. But who cares? He doesn’t have to make sense to you.

This isn’t a criticism of Faris. I’m doing no better than he is. But waving your hand isn’t a plan.

And yet if the Biden legislative agenda is essentially over, the fact that it was Joe Manchin’s fault rather than ‘the Democrats’ will only be fine print meaning basically nothing for the 2022 midterm and the years ahead. That applies to infrastructure, climate, making federal law a backstop for attacks against democracy at the state level and close to everything else.

What I perceive at least is that conventional wisdom is already beginning to acclimate to the idea that maybe none of this stuff is ever going to happen. And that perception, if real, is deadly because it not only saps people of energy and steals away incentives to take risks.

As I’ve explained in other posts and discussions, one of the maddening things about the current political moment is that so much is opaque. The critical discussions are the ones between a very small number of people – in some ways, they’re ones between Manchin and Biden himself. The things that are in public – legislative negotiations between Democrats and Republicans or Republicans and the White House are mostly smoke and meaningless. If Biden and Manchin have some sort of basic understanding then maybe all the rest doesn’t matter. But we really have no way of knowing that.

The real question we have, perhaps the only real question, is what’s Joe Manchin’s endgame? He really thinks he’s going to get bipartisan compromises that don’t fall comically short of what Democrats can accept? He knows that if and when he fails most of this will have to pass on reconciliation votes and he’ll be there as the 50th vote? My real concern is that he has no endgame, no plan, and that the plan is just to work at it and see where it goes. That is a recipe for disaster, though, since one side gains through every day of delay and the other loses.

Just because Biden and the White House are making a good and perhaps the only available strategic choice in playing out Manchin’s bipartisanship game for the reasons I stated above doesn’t mean it will work.

So what is to be done? The only real cudgel the White House has with Manchin is calling his bluff. Manchin says that his highest priority is that Biden’s presidency be a success. So eventually Biden can simply push ahead with his proposal and hope that faced with voting with the Democrats or torpedoing their infrastructure plan Manchin will yelp and fiddle but finally vote for it.

That’s not much of a plan. Manchin may well have, indeed probably has already said, he’ll hold his ground and vote not. (Otherwise, why would we be here?) But it may end up being the only plan available.

[jackd]

"Manchin says that his highest priority is that Biden's presidency be a success." He could be Joe Lieberman talking about Obama. Neither were telling the truth. Both ot them had, as their highest priority, taking care of themselves. Neither gave or gives a shit about the good of the country. Both are as narcissistic as Trump.

[LFC]

Biden is riding steady in the polls and just following the now entrenched split in our country.

I took a peek at Joe Biden’s poll numbers yesterday evening. They’re holding up pretty well four months into his presidency. 538 has a composite approval rating this morning of 53.6%. By longterm historical standards that’s anemic for an incoming president. It’s decent by more recent standards. But what jumps out more than anything is the stability. Biden’s support has undulated only slightly in a narrow two or three point band. Indeed, Biden looks like the inverse of Donald Trump – with support in the low-mid 50s and disapproval hovering just over 40%. The same basic division is in place from last year to this, as though nothing had happened – except that that narrow majority – mid-low-50s – has their president in office.

[pnwguy]

Jun 1, 2021 17:26:46 GMT LFC said:

Biden is riding steady in the polls and just following the now entrenched split in our country.

The same basic division is in place from last year to this, as though nothing had happened – except that that narrow majority – mid-low-50s – has their president in office.

Not if the MAGAt party has their way. Who needs democracy? "We needs a Myanmar style coup here now!"

[Deleted]

According to the Press Sec. cable pundits get a vote in the Senate. Spicey senses are tingling.

[LFC]

C'mon, Joe. Get your f***ing ass in gear on this one.

President Joe Biden's failure to break the Federal Communications Commission's 2-2 partisan deadlock is reaching a "critical point," 57 advocacy groups wrote in a letter to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris Friday.

Nearly five months after his inauguration, Biden has not yet nominated a Democratic FCC commissioner to fill the empty fifth slot. Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel has been leading the commission as acting chairwoman, but she lacks the majority needed to do anything opposed by the FCC's two Republicans, such as reinstating net neutrality rules and reversing former Chairman Ajit Pai's deregulation of the broadband industry. Even a step like raising the FCC's broadband-speed standard—which hasn't changed in over six years—will likely require a party-line vote because Republicans prefer a low speed standard for the FCC's annual report on how many Americans lack modern broadband access.

In early April, over 100,000 people signed a petition urging Biden to quickly break the FCC deadlock. Advocacy groups are frustrated that they are still waiting. Why Biden is taking so long is unclear.

"Given the legislative calendar and the diminishing number of days for hearings and confirmation votes, we have reached a critical point to guarantee the agency charged with ensuring affordable communications access can do its work during your administration," the groups wrote in their new letter.

[Deleted]

Joe Biden: The Republicans will work with me once I'm inaugurated as President. Their Trump fever will break.

Republicans: We will make Joe Biden a half term President (only because we haven't figured out how to make him a quarter term one).

Manchin: Hold my beer.

[LFC]

What's going on with Merrick Garland's DOJ?

When Merrick Garland was sworn in as attorney general in March, Democrats couldn’t wait for him to overhaul a Department of Justice that had started acting like former President Donald Trump’s personal law office.

But three months into his tenure, many Democrats aren’t exactly seeing a turn of the page. While they have largely praised Garland’s first steps on key issues like voting rights, the attorney general has also presided over a series of decisions that have lawmakers frustrated or downright angry.

“I am very concerned by what I had hoped would be a departure from some of the worst behaviors of the Trump administration,” said Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), a House Judiciary member, who mentioned a number of issues Garland has been weak on in the eyes of progressives.

Among those continued Trump policies, the DOJ has kept seizing land near the southern border that would be necessary to construct more of the border wall. It has defended in court a Trump-era posture of denying green cards to certain immigrants living legally in the U.S. And the Justice Department has stood behind Trump-era policies friendly to the fossil fuel industry.

In June, DOJ lawyers continued their defense of former President Trump in a defamation suit lodged by E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of raping her in the 1990s. It outraged Democrats when former Attorney General Bill Barr justified such a use of official resources last year. It shocked them that Garland’s department decided to go along with his argument.

While virtually all Democratic lawmakers have been inclined to give Garland the benefit of the doubt, several key figures in the party are signaling that their patience is wearing thin.

“The Department of Justice has a very long to-do list,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). “I would strongly urge the Department to prioritize the civil rights work, voting protection, antitrust, and not the initiatives begun during the Trump era that undermine justice in this country.”

Warren—who some Democrats hoped might run Joe Biden’s DOJ herself—cautioned that “limited time, limited resources, mean that this Justice department needs to be focused on the protection of our democracy and our economy, not on the protection of Donald Trump.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, noted that it wasn’t the volume but the timing of certain DOJ moves that is “really troubling” her and colleagues—so much so that they are planning to send a letter to Garland outlining their concerns.

“They came so close together, and they make no sense to so many of us,” she said.

[LFC]

Interesting move by Biden on his latest FTC appointee.

President Joe Biden named Lina Khan chair of the Federal Trade Commission just hours after her confirmation in the Senate as one of the agency's five commissioners. It’s an unusual move—newly nominated commissioners are seldom elevated to chair immediately—and it likely signals that the Biden administration will be taking a hawkish approach to antitrust enforcement, particularly when it comes to Big Tech platform companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.

Though Khan is certain to take a harsher view on platforms, the FTC is unlikely to begin dismantling Big Tech tomorrow. “Lina Khan has pushed the academic conversation on tech, and now she has to push the agenda at the FTC,” Shane Greenstein, a professor at Harvard Business School, told Ars. “A lot of the day to day at the FTC has little to do with tech, and a lot of the agenda is just not up to the chairman. It comes inbound from consumer complaints, merger proposals, etc. It will be interesting to see how she manages that—and with a divided Congress. That just has to be challenging.”

[LFC]

Biden is flushing the Trump turds from the Social Security Administration. Republicans are, as expected, whining furiously and peddling the lie it hurting the unicorn they call "bipartisanship."

President Biden fired Trump-era Social Security Administration commissioner Andrew Saul on Friday.

A White House official confirmed to TPM that Biden had asked Kilolo Kijakazi to take over as acting head of the agency.

Kijakazi, a former fellow at the Urban Institute who joined the agency as a deputy commissioner in January 2021, will replace Saul.

A White House official told TPM that Saul refused to resign, as first reported by the Washington Post.

David Black, a deputy commissioner, agreed to resign after being fired. Saul told the Post that he planned on returning to work on Monday.

Congressional Democrats had accused Saul of stymying Biden’s agenda, including through initiatives that would make it harder for people to quality for disability payments.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) described Saul and Black in February as “agents of the Trump Social Security agenda” and said that he was committing the agency to a “path of destruction.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on Friday that he would be vehemently opposed to removing Saul.

After news of Saul’s firing broke, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee described it as political, and said that it was “just the beginning of efforts to raise payroll taxes and seriously undermines bipartisan efforts to save Social Security for future retirees.” It’s not clear how the firing is related to taxes.

Saul was accused of delaying the issuance of stimulus checks after the American Rescue Plan passed in March by failing to provide the IRS with information for Social Security beneficiaries.

“They are sabotaging the Biden administration by delaying relief checks,” Alex Lawson, head of Social Security Works, said in a statement at the time.

The White House official accused Saul of taking actions that “run contrary to the mission of the agency and the President’s policy agenda,” including removing a remote work policy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

[LFC]

Oh, the choots-pah! (Hat tip Michelle Bachmann.) Nice try, Trump turd.

Former Trump-appointed Social Security Administration commissioner Andrew Saul, who’s been stubbornly clutching onto his post after President Joe Biden axed him last week, hit a snag in his gambit on Monday.

Saul attempted to log into work from his home on Monday – only to reportedly discover he’d been blocked from the agency’s computer systems.

“I’m here to do the job, but I can’t do anything with the communications shut down,” he complained to the Washington Post.

However, the former official indicated that he wasn’t giving up the fight.

“Stay tuned,” he said.

Meanwhile, acting commissioner Kilolo Kijakazi has been working to roll back Saul’s policies, which aimed to chip away at disabled Americans’ access to Social Security benefits.

Saul, who had ignored Biden’s request for his resignation before the President fired him Friday, vowed to stay in his post, saying that he considered himself to be “the term-protected commissioner of Social Security.”

Republicans who spent four years allowing Trump to weaponize whatever agency he wanted for his political interests kicked up a fuss over Saul’s firing and accused Biden of politicizing the agency.

[LFC]

Biden and Garland are trying to reestablish the independence of the DOJ (paywalled).

The Justice Department and the White House have been seeking to put some distance between each other since President Biden first took office. But Attorney General Merrick Garland made it official on Wednesday.

In a memo to department staff, which was obtained by USA Today, Garland said the only way the American people will trust the work of the DOJ is if there are clear lines of “independence” from “inappropriate influences” — such as the White House.

“The success of the Department of Justice depends upon the trust of the American people,” Garland wrote. “That trust must be earned every day, and we can do so only through our adherence to the long-standing departmental norms of independence from inappropriate influences, the principled exercise of discretion and the treatment of like cases alike.”

It’s a stark contrast from both Biden and Garland’s predecessors. It became normal for former President Trump to publicly demand his AG investigate his political rivals. And former AG Bill Barr very regularly complied — spinning into oblivion the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe before it was publicly released and interfering in criminal cases involving Trump’s friends and allies. Barr did have a bit of a backbone at the bitter end when he announced that Trump’s big lie was not rooted in any evidence that the DOJ could find.

While it’s been frustrating for liberals, the Biden DOJ has taken pains to be apolitical for months — sparking outrage, for instance, when it seized land as part of a Trump-era border wall eminent domain case.

In the memo, Garland outlined various “safeguards” he planned to put back in place, invoking rules like those established by Edward Levi, the AG Gerald Ford nominated to repair the DOJ after the Watergate scandal. The memo also closely mirrored the language that then-AG Eric Holder used in a 2009 memo setting similar boundaries.

According to USA Today, Garland said the DOJ would not let the White House know about “pending or contemplated” investigations unless it is necessary to the “president’s duties” to be in the know.

The White House issued a similar directive on Wednesday detailing “prohibited contacts” between the White House and other parts of the government including the DOJ, cementing the separation effort that’s been ongoing for some time. A similar document was given to staffers internally on the day of Biden’s inauguration.

[LFC]

I've seen multiple poll numbers go flitting across short headlines both on the web and on TV. The impression they give is that Biden's approval rating is 5 points lower than they're showing at 538. I wonder if they're cherry-picking or if it's just driven by the places I look for or casually see news.

[AnBr]

Biden is outpacing every other president since Richard Nixon in confirming circuit court judges, who have the last word in most federal cases.

[LFC]

Oct 21, 2021 1:25:01 GMT AnBr said:

Biden is outpacing every other president since Richard Nixon in confirming circuit court judges, who have the last word in most federal cases.

Moscow Mitch screeches that the Democrats are packing the courts in 3, 2, ...

[Bact PhD]

I could have put this over in Economics, but since it concerns a nominee who has to be confirmed I put it here. I don’t think I realized the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency was a Presidential appointment until I saw a reference to a “dangerous ideologue” in an investment piece I was reading. So, using my friend Google, I found this piece in BB.

www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-26/saule-omarova-confirmation-behind-biden-s-pick-for-comptroller-of-the-currency

Cornell Law School professor Saule Omarova was thrust into the spotlight in September when the Biden administration announced her nomination for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a branch of the Treasury Department that polices some 1,125 banks. The choice of the avowed liberal and outspoken finance industry critic united Wall Street and tiny community lenders against her. So far, a pretty standard Washington story.
But things quickly grew uglier and more personal. Republican lawmakers raised the specter of a Soviet-style takeover of the finance system, leaning partly on an academic paper Omarova wrote imagining a new role for the Federal Reserve as a kind of public bank—and by asking pointed questions about her biography. …

I’ll admit, more than one thing referred to gave me pause. However, I reminded myself that “stuff discussed in abstract academic papers” =/= “practical policy points executable within the boundaries of a given position”.

Lani Guinier 2.0??

[LFC]

Nov 16, 2021 13:34:13 GMT Bact PhD said:

I don’t think I realized the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency was a Presidential appointment until I saw a reference to a “dangerous ideologue” in an investment piece I was reading.

I first heard about the OCC during the W Bush regime. Something like 22 state AGs were going after predatory lenders to help try to prevent the Bush Bust years before it happened. Bush's hack at the OCC said the Feds, and only the Feds, had jurisdiction and proceeded to shut ALL of the investigations down. (Of course they started none.) The AGs of all 50 states begged Bush to reverse course because this precedent made them unable to safeguard their state residents in the future against multi-state scams. They're voices were dismissed. It was just one way that W Bush continued to inflate the bubble and caused the worst recession in almost a century.

[LFC]

This is good advice for Joe and, in fact, all of the Democrats.

Messaging is generally the most overrated aspect of electoral politics. But it’s not nothing. And Democrats need to do better at it. I just wrote a way too long post on this. But it really comes down to this. President Biden has to learn a lesson from President Trump and brag more about the economy. A lot more. And do it consistently. In every public setting. And about COVID too.

Job reports have been up and down this year. But they’ve actually been consistently revised upward after the fact. That’s happened every month for the last six months for a total of 625,000 additional new jobs. In August the number doubled. But this gets drowned out. Revisions of earlier months don’t make headlines. That’s life. But the power of the presidency is to push these things to the front of the conversation.

News reports frequently note the huge numbers of people quitting their jobs as bad news. In fact, those people in the great majority of cases are quitting their jobs because they’re getting other jobs at better wages, often ones they prefer for various reasons in addition higher wages. (It’s simple math. Lots of quits with the number of people employed remaining high means they’re quitting because they can and are getting new jobs. That’s good.) This may figure into the debate about inflation. But really, you can’t expect anyone to tell a positive story if you won’t do it yourself. Rising wages is good news. Lots of jobs available is also good news. It is. So say so.

COVID is a similar story. Boosters are good. They’re going to help get the country back to normal. It’s an example where a President may see things more clearly than public health experts. Two extremely effective antivirals are also coming up for emergency use authorization – one from Merck and another from Pfizer. Combined with boosted vaccines that really puts the country in a position where close to no one should ever need to end up in the hospital because of COVID. Biden doesn’t need to pretend he invented these drugs like Trump did. But he needs to tell the public story. He’ll be judged on it regardless. So it’s folly to let anyone else do it for him.

You only have to look how Republicans gleefully take credit for things they fought against when Democrats pass them. This happened with COVID relief and is happening now with the infrastructure bill. They need to brag, brag, and brag some more. Mock the Republicans that tried to block the infrastructure bill and tell the nation over and over how they failed to get it done. Point out that their big accomplishment was to give money to rich people and skyrocket the deficit and debt. They just don't ever seem to really want to do it at the level they need to.

[LFC]

Once Biden put up this nominee Russia was suddenly a bad thing to Republicans again. How ... predictable.

Senate Republicans suggested on Thursday that a Soviet-trained communist was about to take over a key office in the country’s banking regulation infrastructure.

President Biden nominated Cornell University law professor Saule Omarova to be comptroller of the currency in September. But at her Thursday confirmation hearing, Republican senators played on Omarova’s birth in the former Soviet Union to suggest that she was a Marxist sleeper agent.

“Have you resigned from the young Communists?” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Omarova at the hearing.

Kennedy was referring to Omarova’s early years in the USSR. Born in what is now Kazakhstan, Omarova received the prestigious Lenin scholarship to study at Moscow State University. As a child, she was also a member of the komsomol, the communist youth — a common group to be involved in in the USSR.

It’s all read meat for opponents of Omarova’s candidacy on the Senate Finance Committee, which held a confirmation hearing on Thursday.

“Did you send them a letter resigning?” Kennedy asked, referring to Omarova’s komsomol membership.

Committee Chair Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) interrupted him, saying that Omarova had “renounced her Soviet citizenship.”

Kennedy pressed on to Omarova: “I don’t mean any disrespect — I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.”

Omarova is up for an extremely important role. As comptroller of the currency, she’ll be in charge of chartering banks, and supervising them. It’s a job that holds great authority over the country’s largest banks. The office can levy fines and restrict activities of the country’s biggest banks if supervisors find particularly egregious deficiencies.

“What do the banks like? They like light regulations, and they like freedom to do what they want to do to make money,” said Phillip Basil, director of banking at Better Markets, a financial regulation-focused non-profit told TPM. “And what they don’t want as head of the comptroller of the currency is someone who is going to pursue strong supervision. That means they’re going to have to spend a lot of money on infrastructure — staff that are just pure overhead.”

“So the more assertive the supervisory program is, under the head of the OCC, the more banks are going to be concerned for a couple of reasons,” Basil added.

Yeah, and banks have proven themselves soooooooo responsible under light regulation.

[goldenvalley]

Senator or should I call you Member of the Elite?  He's not quite Ivy League but U of Virginia Law School is not LSU Law School.

[LFC]

Biden may finally be moving to oust DeJoy from the USPS.

President Joe Biden is slated to announce on Friday that he won’t keep a top ally of controversial Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on the U.S. Postal Service board of governors next month, according to the Washington Post.

The ally, USPS board chair Ron Bloom, reportedly will not be renominated to the nine-member board when his term ends next month. Though Bloom is a Democrat, he supports DeJoy, who was appointed by ex-President Donald Trump and has implemented USPS policies that have slowed down deliveries while hiking up prices.

Bloom’s critics have pointed a potential conflict of interest between the chair and DeJoy, who has bought more than $300,000 in bonds from Bloom’s asset management company.

[LFC]

Biden's nominees continue to face the temper tantrums of lying, grandstanding, anti-democracy Republicans.

Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn faced off against Republican senators at a nomination hearing yesterday, disputing the senators' shaky claims that she would use a post at the FCC to censor conservatives.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) repeated arguments previously made by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which mostly boil down to complaints about Sohn's tweets criticizing Fox News and her criticism of Sinclair Broadcast Group. In the Sinclair case, as we previously wrote, Sohn was actually on the same side as then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. Pai led a unanimous FCC vote that blocked Sinclair's attempt to purchase Tribune Media Company because of evidence that Sinclair's merger plan was illegal.

Sullivan and Cruz seized on these issues as evidence that Sohn would censor Fox News and conservatives in general during yesterday's Senate Commerce Committee hearing. They did so even though the leaders of conservative news networks Newsmax and One America News Network supported Sohn's nomination and praised her longtime commitment to free speech.

Sullivan's questioning of Sohn didn't get very far because he repeatedly interrupted Sohn's attempts to answer his questions. He falsely accused Sohn of "purging" her Twitter account and then ran out of his allotted time. Cruz gave Sohn time to answer his questions in some depth, but he also misrepresented her views on whether the FCC should regulate Big Tech.

[LFC]

Here's a suggestion of 3 things for Biden and the Democrats to do now.

Reality is here. The time for wishful thinking is over. Democrats don’t have the votes in the Senate to pass voting rights bills or the expansive Build Back Better (BBB) spending bill they’ve spent months debating among themselves.

But Democrats can do their part to salvage the Biden presidency by doing three things.

First: Reach out to Republican Senator Mitt Romney, the GOP’s one-time standard bearer, and take him up on his offer to modernize the 1887 Electoral Count Act (ECA).

Next: Move quickly to seal the bipartisan deal on the domestic manufacturing of desperately-needed semiconductor chips.

Finally: Figure out what a certain moderate Democratic senator from West Virginia will allow in BBB, and as Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg put it, “Sign whatever deal [Joe] Manchin will go for.” And then go sell it like crazy to the public.

“What I’m hearing is that Democrats are ready to unite around anything Biden can get from Manchin,” Greenberg told The Daily Beast, signaling that progressive Democrats too are at last reconciled to reality. Manchin might have balked at the originally proposed $3.5 trillion BBB price tag, but earlier in the process Manchin proposed his own $1.8 trillion package that included significant tax-the-rich proposals. Those policies, if adopted, would have put him to the left of where Barack Obama was as president.