Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced Friday that he will oppose Neera Tanden, a Clinton ally with a partisan social media history, to head the Office of Management and Budget, effectively eliminating the chance that Tanden could be confirmed strictly along party lines.
“I have carefully reviewed Nerra Tanden’s public statements and tweets that were personally directed towards my colleagues on both sides of the aisle from Senator Sanders to Senator McConnell and others. I believe her overly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,” Manchin said in a statement. “For this reason, I cannot support her nomination.”
“As I have said before, we must take meaningful steps to end the political division and dysfunction that pervades our politics,” added the Democratic senator from West Virginia. “At a time of grave crisis, it is more important than ever that we chart a new bipartisan course that helps address the many serious challenges our nation is facing.”
Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, started getting heat almost immediately after President Joe Biden announced that she would be nominated to the position. According to CNN, Tanden deleted nearly 1,000 tweets ahead of her nomination fight, including one accusing Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and former Senator Jeff Flake of being “criminally ignorant.”
During the actual nomination hearings, she was grilled again and again by lawmakers across the political spectrum for her social media history.
In one exchange, Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) accused Tanden of calling Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) “everything but an ignorant slut” — an accusation she denied — and proceeded to ask her nearly a dozen times whether she meant the things she said about other political opponents on social media. After repeatedly deflecting from the question, she responded: “Senator, I must have meant them, but I really regret them.”
As The Daily Wire previously reported:
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), ranking member of the budget committee, said that Tanden wasn’t “the unity pick” he expected from the Biden administration, and called her a “very partisan figure.” Graham pointed to a comment she made about Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who she called “Moscow Mitch,” and another comment she made in which she accused the Republican Party of having a “capacity for evil” that “knows no bounds.”
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Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), chairman of the budget committee, also mentioned Tanden’s behavior on social media in his line of questioning, although he didn’t single out specific tweets.
In response to Sanders, Tanden remarked: “I recognize that my language and my expressions on social media caused hurt to people, and I feel badly about that, and I really regret it, and I recognize it’s really important for me to demonstrate that I can work with others, and I look forward to taking that burden, and I apologize to people on either the Left or Right who are hurt by what I’ve said.”