If you don’t want your nominees to be referred to as ‘comrade,’ don’t nominate socialists who praise the Soviet Union.
Saule Omarova has withdrawn her nomination to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency due to opposition from five Democratic senators. Republicans could do absolutely nothing to stop Joe Biden’s nominee other than highlight her extremism and hope that public pressure would do the trick.
It did. Now, you wouldn’t know any of this if you were simply perusing the news this morning. NPR claimed in a tweet that Omarova withdrew her nomination “after facing personal attacks about being born in the former Soviet Union.” The New York Times says that “lobbyists and Republicans painted her as a communist because she was born in the Soviet Union.”
These are lies. And neither outlet provides a single quote to back the assertion that Senate Republicans had personally attacked the Cornell professor over being “born in the Soviet Union.” Perhaps some of this confusion hinges on the fact that many in the media have tried to create the impression that Omarova is some kind of political refugee who escaped Soviet tyranny to come to the United States. That too was untrue, as it was happenstance that the exchange student found herself stranded in Wisconsin when the Soviet Union fell. She never defected.
Most senators condemned her because Omarova has proposed nationalizing the American financial system, empowering the Federal Reserve to take over consumer deposits, and “effectively end[ing] banking, as we know it.” It is Omarova who proposed a “National Investment Authority,” a nomenklatura that would redistribute your money into a “big and bold” climate agenda. This, after she recommended that states bankrupt private energy companies so we can “basically get rid of these carbon financiers” by “starv[ing] them of their source of capital.” The woman wrote a paper titled “The People’s Ledger” last year. Then, there is Omarova’s pernicious defense of the USSR’s lack of “a gender pay gap.”
Omarova is free to kick around theories with her “Marxist Analysis and Policy” Facebook group, but she’s not afforded any special dispensation allowing her to avoid answering for her positions and past comments. Senator John Kennedy brought up her memberships and academic work in the Soviet Union to argue that she hadn’t changed her position today, not that she is bonded to them forever. If you don’t want your nominees to be referred to as “comrade,” don’t nominate socialists who praise the Soviet Union.