Tweets that came back to haunt Tanden: Indian-American cabinet nominee Neera Tanden roasted over social media posts

WASHINGTON: She took on all comers, including her own party stalwarts, on social media, scorching and scalding them for months with insulting tweets.
She called Senate leader Mitch McConnell "Moscow Mitch" and "Voldemort," characterized Senator Tom Cotton as a fraud, and said vampires have more heart than (Senator) Ted Cruz.
Instructive of the fact that social media posts don't die, those tweets came back to haunt Neera Tanden, President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the White House budget office, at her confirmation hearing on Wednesday, even though she had deleted hundreds of them.
Senators hauled her over the coals for what they felt were inflammatory tweets their staff had dug out from the archives.
"You called Senator Sanders everything but an ignorant slut," Republican John Kennedy drawled as she squirmed uncomfortably. "Did you mean what you said?"
"I feel terribly about [the comments]," Tanden said, before conceding, "I must have meant them but I regret them."
Sanders, who heads the Budget Committee, was himself a little more charitable, reminding her that her posts included not just jabs at Republicans but also "vicious attacks against progressives," such as himself, leading Tanden to acknowledge that her remarks "caused hurt to people...I apologize to people on the left or right who have been hurt by what I’ve said."
The left-liberal Senator was more concerned about corporate donations that the Center for American Progress, the think-tank that Tanden headed before she was nominated for the cabinet-level post, had received. "Since 2014, Center for American Progress has received at least $38 million from corporate America, including Wall St. and every special interest that I can think of," Sanders told her, reeling of the donations: $5.5M from Walmart... $900,000 from Bank of America, $550,000 from JP Morgan Chase, $550,000 from Amazon, $200,000 from Wells Fargo, $800,000 from Facebook, and up to $1.4M from Google. How would they influence her?
Tanden assured him that if he is confirmed, there will be no special interest pressures, and such past donations "will have zero impact on my decision-making." She also committed to several of Sanders' policy prescriptions, including support for higher minimum wage, negotiating drug prices, a lower Medicare eligibility age, free college tuition for middle class, and climate action.
A long-time Hillary Clinton groupie, Tanden is the first woman of color and first Indian-American to be nominated to lead the Office of Management and Budget.
She and her supporters have cited her difficult upbringing -- brought up by a single mother who was on welfare for two years and who benefited from government programs -- to argue that she knows the pain and needs of workaday Americans.
But her intense and combative social media style has often riled people on both sides of the aisle, including progressive and liberal elements in her own party.
One GOP Senator reminded her that she had tweeted more in the past four years than President Trump tweeted... "and it’s been pretty hostile, obviously. You’ve called Republicans ‘criminally ignorant,’ ‘corrupt’ and ‘the worst.'"
Tanden took cover in the political tension during Trump’s time in office, saying, "I do think the last several years have been very polarizing and I apologize for my language that has contributed to that." It is not clear if the Senators will be in a forgiving mood when they vote to confirm her.
There are ten Democratic and ten Republican members on the budget committee, and it will be in Sanders' hands to get Tanden's nomination through.
But Tanden also has her supporters who expressed themselves on social media. "To be clear, Republicans think that Neera Tanden's tweets, calling them assholes, is a reason to deny her confirmation. But they don't think Donald Trump's speeches, encouraging a crowd to murder them, is grounds for impeachment," read one tweet. Another said: "It's too bad for Neera Tanden that none of her tweets cheered on an insurrectionist mob to violently storm the Capitol because then Senate Republicans would have been unable to see them."