Saule Omarova, the radical leftist nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, the key banking supervisory position in the U.S., has withdrawn her nomination as it became clear that it would not be successful in the Senate.
“Omarova’s withdrawal came after concerns from Republican senators about the Cornell University professor’s writings as a legal scholar,” reported CNBC, “as well as her background of being raised in the former Soviet Union.”
President Biden, in accepting her withdrawal, claimed that the GOP made Omarova “subjected to inappropriate personal attacks that were far beyond the pale.”
Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always “know best.” https://t.co/vvnx9DZICN
— Saule Omarova (@STOmarova) March 31, 2019
Omarova attended college at Moscow State University on a Lenin scholarship, named after the communist revolutionary and founder of the Soviet state, and grew up under communism in the old USSR.
Her views from back then are clouded in obscurity, made more obscure by her own reluctance to discuss them.
When asked to produce a copy of her thesis at Moscow State by Republicans senators, Omarova said both that she did not have a copy of the thesis and that she no longer subscribed to the ideas in it.
“I was in the Soviet Union, where there was no academic freedom, and this was a mandatory assigned topic. What I wrote in that paper has nothing to do with what I believed in then or in what I believe in now,” Omarova told Senator Pat Toomey, R-Pa., while refusing to elucidate the views expressed in the thesis, according to MSNBC.
Even more worrying to some was a tweet of Omarova’s from 2019 that claimed that Western countries have larger gender pay gaps than the Soviet Union.
“Until I came to the US,” Omarova wrote on Twitter, “I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’”
In fact, there is a great deal of evidence that while the USSR paid lip-service to women’s equality, the pay gap in the Soviet Union far exceeded anything in today’s Western economies.
One study found that “women earned between 65 to 75 percent of men’s pay” in the USSR.
More important than GOP skepticism of Omarova was that the nominee proved to be too radical for even for Democrats.
“But Omarova also faced what ultimately was the more problematic lack of support for her nomination by several moderate Democrats, Mark Warner of Virginia, and Montana’s Jon Tester, due to her opposition to a bill that had lifted some regulatory restrictions on banks,” said CNBC.
