Joe Manchin opposes Neera Tanden’s OMB nomination.

The candidate for the office of management and the budget, Neera Tanden, appreciated the senators’ concern about her tweets. She regrets calling Mitch McConnell ‘Voldemort’ and Susan Collins ‘the worst’, or tweeting that ‘vampires have more hearts than Ted Cruz.’ She lamented that tweets indicated that Russians had hacked real voting machines in the 2016 election, in favor of Donald Trump. On the other hand, she deplores the struggle with the ominous Marxist egg reports on Bernie Sanders over the caution of pursuing legislation on single halls. She did this apology tour last week before two Senate committees.

Despite the effort, she may be President Biden’s first cabinet election to have taken place. Joe Manchin, the most central member of the 50-seat Senate Democratic majority, announced Friday afternoon that he opposed her nomination.

“I have thoroughly reviewed Neera Tanden’s public statements and tweets personally addressed to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, from Senator Sanders to Senator McConnell and others,” Manchin said in a statement. ‘I believe that her openly biased statements will have a toxic and detrimental effect on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget. For this reason, I cannot support her nomination. ”

If we accept that, for the sake of the argument, that all other Democrats would support Teeth, the Democrats would need one Republican to join them to confirm her. President Biden said Friday night that he was not going to get her nomination, and that “I think we will find the votes to get her confirmed.”

Hmm. I reached out to the usual suspects (Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski) to see if there was a swinging voice for the take, but still need to hear. However, there are various reasons to doubt that any Republican would be willing to offer Biden such a favor. They can throw the dice and hope for a new nominee who is less progressive than Teeth. (Although many leftists despise Tanden over her belittling of Sanders’ campaign in the past, she was completely in line with the project to fund a robust agenda through deficit spending.) They need a ‘win’ and they have the opportunity to reject one by a solid C-list villain from the Fox News Cinematic Universe. Both Collins and Murkowski only voted to convict a Republican president on a charge of conviction and could use a makeup call – or, at the very least, the absence of another apostasy. And of course, Collins was the target for Teeth’s placement, and Murkowski is Collins’ very good friend. There is no simple reason for any Republican to support her. They do not need it, but they have a dual coverage of Manchin to start.

Manchin is going to do such things from time to time. He will make few sacrifices to the gods of duality to maintain a semblance of credibility in the middle. And if that kind of mess on the sidelines frees him up to vote for a $ 1.9 billion COVID bill, his Democratic colleagues will not complain too much.