WASHINGTON (LifeSiteNews) — Cornell law professor Saule Omarova withdrew her nomination to be currency comptroller of the U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday after pushback from moderate Democrats made clear there would be insufficient Senate support to confirm President Joe Biden’s controversial pick.
Born in the former Soviet nation of Kazakhstan, Omarova immigrated to the United States in 1991. The White House hails Omarova as “one of the country’s leading academic experts on issues related to regulation of systemic risk and structural trends in financial markets,” but her selection quickly drew fire for her past praise of aspects of the former Soviet Union and her support of policies more aligned with the former Communist regime than the American tradition.
The Wall Street Journal reported in September that she “graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Thirty years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior, and that U.S. banking should be remade in the Gosbank’s image … Ms. Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government.”
In 2021, Omarova authored a paper titled “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy,” in which she advocated turning private banks into “non-depository lenders,” which she said would strip them of “their ‘special’ status entity-based access to the public subsidy,” thereby causing them to “lose their appeal as potential acquisition targets for other financial institutions” and ultimately “‘end[ing] banking,’ as we know it.”
The professor’s record elicited strident criticism from Republican senators and unease among a few moderate Democrats. Now, Politico reports that Omarova wrote in her withdrawal letter that it was “no longer tenable for me to continue as a presidential nominee.” In a statement, Biden claimed she was the victim of “inappropriate personal attacks that were far beyond the pale.”
“I have accepted Saule Omarova’s request to withdraw her name from nomination for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency,” the president said. “I nominated Saule because of her deep expertise in financial regulation and her long-standing, respected career in the private sector, the public sector, and as a leading academic in the field.”
Among the Democrats who disagreed were Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Mark Warner of Virginia.
While Biden won his party’s 2020 presidential nomination in part on the belief that his “mainstream, centrist” reputation would make him more electable than other Democrats, soon after taking office he began governed from the far left, from COVID vaccine mandates and Afghanistan to LGBT causes and social media censorship, as well as using the force of the federal government to threaten or coerce states that differ with the administration on issues such as abortion, mask mandates, education policy, and election integrity.