During a confirmation hearing in the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) proved that though he may not be as well known as his equally obnoxious GOP colleagues, Sens. Ted Cruz (TX) and Josh Hawley (MO), he’s just as narrow-minded and bigoted as his two colleagues.
The Banking Committee was considering the nomination of Saule Omarova to be comptroller of currency, and Kennedy used his allotted time to suggest that since Dr. Omarova was born in Kazakhstan when it was still part of the Soviet Union. As a child in that Soviet satellite, Omarova was forced to join the Young Communists because if she hadn’t she would have been persecuted by Soviet authorities and perhaps even sent to a gulag where she would more than likely have died.
Specifically, according to CNBC, Kennedy went out of his way to suggest that Omarova might still be a communist:
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., asked Omarova about her membership in a youth communist group during her childhood in Kazakhstan.
Omarova replied that membership in the Communist Party was required under the totalitarian government and noted that members of her family were murdered by the Communist Party led by Joseph Stalin.
That’s the very same Joseph Stalin who killed an estimated 6 million people he considered to be “disloyal” to him. The Omarova family could either claim to be communists or they could have been wiped off the face of the planet.
And yet, Kennedy felt it necessary to then add:
“I’m struggling with what to call her. I don’t know whether to call her ‘Professor’ or ‘Comrade.’”
Fortunately, Democrats on the committee called out Kennedy for his comments, with Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown of Ohio noting that his colleague was asking “irrelevant” questions. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called Kennedy’s remarks “vicious.”
The real reason Kennedy and other Republicans are opposed to Dr. Omarova is because she’s promised to keep a close eye on the reckless fiscal policies of big banks, telling NY Magazine in a recent interview:
“They [the banks] know that I won’t let them do whatever they want. I’m not the one to easily go along with whatever big banks would tell me is ‘good for them, therefore good for the country.’ I want to make sure that what is good for them is also good for the country. I’m also very reasonable, and I will have an open door, and I will work with any bank that wants to do good for the country. Any bank that wants to channel credit into the real communities, real economy, I’ll be their best friend. If wealthy banks genuinely commit to doing good for the United States, then they have nothing to be afraid of from me. Nothing.”
That’s not what big banks like Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo want to hear, so their paid puppets in the Senate GOP are attacking Dr. Omarova as some sort of a danger to capitalism, which is total bullshit.
Banks need to be regulated. If you doubt that, remember how the foolish policies of banks nearly crashed the U.S. economy back in 2007 and led to what became known as the Great Recession.
Sen. Kennedy and his ilk are nothing but bigoted assholes who would gladly crash the American economy again if it would benefit their corporate sugar daddies.