“Tone policing”
U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) Monday morning announced she will vote against President Joe Biden’s pick to head the powerful and important Office of Management and Budget (OMB), claiming she is uncomfortable with Neera Tanden‘s “temperament.”
Collins also claimed Tanden did not have sufficient experience for the job, as CNN reports.
Tanden has been president of the Center for American Progress for nearly a decade, and served within the Obama administration as senior adviser to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. She also served as associate director for domestic policy in the Clinton White House.
The Atlantic in 2016 also reported “Tanden was a key architect of the Affordable Care Act after serving as a top policy adviser for Clinton’s 2008 bid.” But it was her work drafting a public option for ObamaCare, later tossed, that may be the most threatening aspect of Tanden, not her “mean tweets.”
Indeed, Collins and Democratic Senator Joe Manchin both cited Tanden’s active and adversarial Twitter account as one of the main reason they will vote against her.
“Neera Tanden has neither the experience nor the temperament to lead this critical agency,” Collins said in a statement Monday. “Her past actions have demonstrated exactly the kind of animosity that President Biden has pledged to transcend.”
In a show of good will and a strong signal that she is very willing to work with Republicans, Tanden apologized many times for her tweets during her Senate Budget Committee confirmation hearing. She also deleted over a thousand of them.
Collins used that act of contrition as a weapon against Tanden, saying it “raises concerns about her commitment to transparency.”
Some of the tweets Tanden deleted?
These, about Senator Collins:
But Tanden did not delete all her tweets about Collins. This is still up:
Many are furious about what they see as Collins’ hypocrisy.
Image: Susan Collins with Brett Kavanaugh, who she voted to confirm to a lifetime appoint,kent on the U.S. Supreme Court