Biden's pick to lead White House budget office emerges as lightning rod for GOP [View all]

[BainsBane]

Basically they don't like her because she's a Democrat.

Tanden, 50, has regularly clashed with the GOP in a manner that Republicans say will complicate her Senate confirmation process. Several GOP senators said Monday that she could run into trouble during confirmation hearings, warning that her “partisan” background could make it hard for her to win Republican support.

The two Senate Republicans poised to lead committees that would hold Tanden’s confirmation hearings both declined to commit to doing so. One of them — Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who is in line to chair the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — also said he hopes that Biden will decide not to formally nominate Tanden.

“The concern I have is both judgment, based on the tweets that I’ve been shown, just in the last 24 hours … and it’s the partisan nature,” said Portman, a former Office of Management and Budget director himself. “Of all the jobs, that’s one where I think you would need to be careful not to have someone who’s overtly partisan.”

The other potential committee chairman who would oversee Tanden’s hearings, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), chuckled when asked about Tanden on Monday, noting that she in the past has had a lot to say about him. He also declined to commit to hearings for her, saying only that he’ll “cross that bridge when we get there.”

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters, “I’m not disqualifying anybody, but I do think it gets a lot harder obviously if they send someone from their progressive left that [is] kind of out of the mainstream.” Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s first budget director, told Fox News that Tanden had very little chance of being confirmed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/11/30/biden-omb-neera-tanden/