Fight over top Biden pick highlights battles that will shape his presidency
(CNN)The reeling nomination of Neera Tanden as White House budget director is highlighting the crucial early battles on Capitol Hill that will shape the future of the Biden presidency, the terrain of the midterm elections and the fate of the Republican Party.
Two
Senate committees overseeing Tanden's nomination postponed votes on
Wednesday on whether to move her candidacy to the full chamber. The
White House insisted it would not fold on trying to get her confirmed
but her path forward -- amid controversy about her past tweets slamming
Republicans -- is looking increasingly impossible. Aides to Joe Biden know this first big fight over a key nominee will help set the terms of the new President's relationship with Congress.
The
controversy shows how after four years of politics by tweeted decree in
the Trump era, normal service is resuming inside the Beltway in all its
brutal, hypocritical, and high-stakes glory as everyone with power
tries to wield it to set the tone for the coming years. Other bitter confirmation hearings
are turning into early de-facto fights on the great issues of the Biden
era, like climate change and expanding access to health care.
Republicans are meanwhile beginning to mobilize against Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid
rescue package in the hope of billing it as an example of massive
liberal overreach and winning a political payoff. Yet they are making a
significant gamble. If Biden pulls the country out of the pandemic with
the help of the bill -- that is currently popular -- the GOP will look
mean and irresponsible.
The
Covid relief plan is meanwhile stretching the papered over unity
observed by Democrats in their election-year zeal to beat Donald Trump,
with a split widening over including a minimum wage hike in the huge
plan.
The
internal Democratic tussle begs many questions, including, when will
Biden step in and impose his authority? How fair is he willing to
appease moderate Democrats who want a watering down of some aspects of
the package? And would any Democrat -- however infuriated they might be
over compromises made to either the right or the left -- dare to break
with their new President on the test of his power in a 50-50 Senate?
Party splits
The
Republican Party is even more divided than Democrats. While some
senators like Mitt Romney are working through principled objections to
Biden's policies and nominees, Trump loyalists like Sens. Ted Cruz, Josh
Hawley and Ron Johnson are performing for their watching leader in
exile and, perhaps more critically, his base of supporters. They are
forcing their party into what may turn into a four-year fight over
Trump's lies about an election he lost.
The
traumatic reality of Trump's legacy again reverberated through the US
Capitol on Tuesday in a hearing that probed security failures exposed
when the mob he told to "fight like Hell" invaded the corridors of power.
"These criminals came prepared for war," said former US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund.
Tanden,
the president of the Center for American Progress has fallen foul of
Republicans upset by her outspoken tweets and some progressives like
Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders with whom she sparred as a
senior aide to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. After West Virginia Sen.
Joe Manchin, a Democrat walking a tightrope over his deeply
conservative state, said he couldn't back Tanden, her prospects of
confirmation appeared bleak. But the White House is not yet willing to
fold and is searching for a Republican to get Tanden over the line.
The White House is not pulling Tanden's nomination for now.
"Neera
Tanden is a leading policy expert who brings critical qualifications to
the table during this time of unprecedented crisis," press secretary
Jen Psaki told CNN after the vote was postponed.
"She
also has important perspective and values, understanding firsthand the
powerful difference policy can make in the lives of those going through
hard times. She has a broad spectrum of support, ranging from the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce to labor unions, and has a strong record of working
with both parties that we expect to grow in President Biden's cabinet as
the first South Asian woman to lead OMB."
Another under pressure Biden nominee, New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland,
who would become the first Native American Cabinet member if she makes
it to the Interior Department, faced fierce attacks from Republicans
during her confirmation hearing Tuesday.
The
GOP, with a clear eye on midterm elections that are usually tough for
first-term presidents, is driving a case that Biden's climate policies
-- including a pause on new leases for oil and gas extraction on federal lands -- are a massive job killer.
"Why
not just let these workers keep their jobs?" Wyoming Republican Sen.
John Barrasso asked Haaland, as part of an emerging strategy by
Republicans to leverage the hearings to highlight their own policy
goals.
Washington
Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell captured the underlying dynamic of the
hearing. "I almost feel like your nomination is this proxy fight for the
future of fossil fuels," she told Haaland.
In a fresh sign of tensions inside the Democratic Party, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
a standard bearer for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party,
rebuked Manchin after his office said he had "remaining questions" for
Haaland, noting that the West Virginian voted to confirm Trump's first
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who she called "openly racist."
"Yet the 1st Native woman to be Cabinet Sec is where Manchin finds unease?" Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
In another hearing, Romney pressed Biden's nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary, Xavier Becerra, on another defining disagreement between the parties: abortion.
"I
raised a question about partial birth abortion that he chose not to
answer. That is obviously a concern," Romney said, raising additional
concerns about Haaland and Tanden.
The
hearings also reflected another dominant theme of the new
administration. While there is fierce debate over their credentials, the
ethnicity of Tanden, an Indian American, Haaland, a Native American,
and Becerra, who is Hispanic, reflect the diversity at the heart of
Biden's administration.
Looming clash over Covid package
Elsewhere
in the Capitol on Tuesday, Republican senators worked through the
intricacies of the budget procedure known as reconciliation, which
Democrats plan to use to ease the Covid rescue bill past filibuster
attempts.
At
their weekly conference lunch, the GOP caucus also strategized on how
to challenge Democratic unity during debate on the package, CNN's Lauren
Fox reported. In one possible troublemaking maneuver that would double
as points on the board ahead of congressional elections in November
2022, Romney and Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton are working on a
plan to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour on condition that there
are mandatory requirements on business to discourage the hiring of
undocumented migrants.
Their
gambit followed Manchin's proposal to hike the rate to $11 per hour
over two years. Neither suggestion is likely to be acceptable to
progressive Democrats who are seeking to include a $15 per hour minimum
wage in the Covid rescue plan. This could all be academic -- at least
for now -- since both sides are waiting from a ruling from the Senate
parliamentarian on whether including minimum wage changes is allowed
under reconciliation rules.
The
White House added to the sense of uncertainty on Tuesday by refusing to
say whether Biden would sign a bill that included the $11 an hour
figure.
"The President proposed $15 because that's what he thinks is right for American workers," press secretary Jen Psaki said.
Tugs
of war over economic policy and the shape of relief legislation -- and
ideological fault line issues like abortion -- are necessary features of
the adversarial democratic process. But some Republicans, who abetted
the ex-President's assault on America's political system fraud, can't
break the habit
Missouri
Sen. Josh Hawley, who led the charge in the Senate to stop Biden's
legitimate election win, tried to re-up Trump's misleading claims that
Biden wanted to "defund the police" during a hearing on the nomination of attorney general designate Merrick Garland on Monday.
Hawley
hit back Tuesday at reporters who asked whether he was complicit in the
riot after challenging Biden's election win. "I would say that's
absolutely outrageous and an utter lie and no one I think who knows any
of the facts alleges any such thing," he said.
Also
in the Garland hearing, Texas Sen. Cruz complained about the
politicization of the Justice Department during the Obama
administration, ignoring former Attorney General William Barr's role in
acting almost as Trump's personal attorney during the previous
administration.
And Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, one of Trump's favorite senators, on Tuesday used the Senate hearing
into the insurrection to imply on the thinnest of evidence that the
rioters who desecrated the Capitol were not Trump supporters at all, in
referring to an article that suggested that security forces might have
overreacted to the violence.
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