5 top Democrats crush Biden Administration's OCC nominee

In a phone call on Wednesday, five Democratic senators told Senate Banking Committee chairman Sen. Sherrod Brown that they will not support Biden Administration nominee Saule Omarova’s bid to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, effectively handing Republicans a win after weeks of fiery debate.

The opposing Democratic senators include Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), all members of the Senate Banking Committee, and Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.).

The willingness of Democrats to oppose the White House on such a symbolically important nomination serves as a window into the controversy surrounding Omarova’s nomination.

The Cornell University law professor has come under attack by Republicans in recent months over concerns with her academic writings about crypto-currencies and big banks, effectively turning her nomination into a “proxy battle over how banks should be regulated,” Axios reported.

The Biden Administration fired back on Wednesday night saying that the attacks on Omarova are so unfair that “that they smacked of the red-baiting smears leveled by Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.”

In October, Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, the GOP’s top man on the Senate Banking Committee, took to the floor to point out that her undergraduate scholarship at Moscow State University focused on Marxism.

He went on to tell Bloomberg Television that she was an unacceptable candidate because of her previous support for “socialist” policies.

Omarova, however, has often described as a “free-market idealist.” 

“I know that Soviet-style communism doesn’t work,” she said. “I’ve lived through it. That system was deeply flawed. It’s dead.”