Senate Banking Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-OH) tore into right-wing media and Republican senators’ treatment of President Joe Biden’s nominee, Saule Omarova, to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
The Thursday Senate confirmation hearing for Omarova turned tense as Republican senators accused her of communist affiliations and fireworks flew over her youth spent in the former Soviet Union, in which she was automatically a member of a communist youth group.
“I don’t know whether to call you ‘professor’ or ‘comrade,’ ” Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) said to Omarova, which started a tense exchange between Brown and Kennedy.
Omarova replied to Kennedy, “Senator, I’m not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.”
Omarova, who is currently a law professor at Cornell University, was born and raised in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan before emigrating to the U.S., eventually serving in the George W. Bush administration.
Brown made remarks slamming the Republicans and the right-leaning media for their treatment of Omarova:
“The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed, or maybe more accurately a hit job, they highlighted she went to Moscow University, they highlighted she received a scholarship named after Vladimir Lenin. Neglecting to mention that pretty much everything in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, was named after Lenin … They made outlandish claims based on where she grew up. They say she believes the Soviet economic
system was superior to ours. False. They say she wanted to establish communist rule over banking here in the United States. False again.”
Brown continued laying into the Wall Street Journal for neglecting to mention Omarova “renounced her communist citizenship” and became an American and “started her family here.”
Brown continued slamming his GOP Senate colleagues, saying, “They have a formula: Start with a passing and inaccurate reference to her academic work, distort the substance beyond recognition, mix in words like ‘Marx,’ and ‘Lenin,’ and ‘communism.’ End with insinuations about Professor Omarova’s loyalties to her chosen country”
“Now we know what happens when Trumpism meets McCarthyism,” he concluded. “It’s a cruelty no person should experience.”