Toomey on Senate Floor: I’ve Never Seen a More ‘Radical’ Regulatory Nominee Than Saule Omarova
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) spoke on the floor of the U.S. Senate today to express concern over President Biden’s intent to nominate Saule Omarova as Comptroller of the Currency.
This
morning Senator Toomey released a letter
to Ms. Omarova requesting a copy of her thesis, “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis
and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital,” to allow the Committee to
fully assess her nomination. Ms. Omarova’s thesis, which she authored
while studying at Moscow State University on the V.I. Lenin Personal Academic
Scholarship, recently disappeared from her resume.
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Key Excerpts
“Ms.
Omarova has been celebrated on the far left for promoting ideas she herself has
described as ‘radical.’ That’s a point we can agree on. These are very, very
radical ideas. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more radical choice
for any regulatory spot in our federal government. I know that is a very
sweeping statement to make. I think I can stand by it.”
“There’s
a lot that’s extraordinary and radical here—but maybe the heart of it is that
Ms. Omarova doesn’t just want tightened regulation of banks. What she wants to,
and I quote—this is her words—‘effectively end banking as we know it.’
Those are words she wrote just last year.”
"She
clearly has an aversion to anything like free market capitalism . . .
in an October 2020 paper called ‘The People’s Ledger,’ she outlined a plan for
‘radically reshaping the basic architecture and dynamics of modern finance.’"
“She
promoted the nationalization of an entire industry: retail banking . . . a
clear socialist idea.”
“Ms.
Omarova doesn’t just want to nationalize banking . . . she also wants the
banking regulators to run the whole economy.
Under her plan, laid out in a 2016 paper, the Federal Reserve would set prices
in large sectors of the U.S. economy that she deems to be ‘systemically
important prices,’ . . . ‘… widely used fuels, foodstuffs, and some other raw
material’ and ‘wage or salary indices,’ among others. She’s openly advocated
that the Federal government sets wages and prices throughout the economy. Is
this not anything like a free enterprise economy? It’s unbelievable.”
“In
addition, citing a desire to ‘sidestep debilitating political battles over the
federal budget’ . . . that fundamentally democratic process that follows our
Constitution, in a 2020 white paper Omarova proposed creating a National
Investment Authority to channel both public and private capital to further
policies that will be set by an unelected, unaccountable board. The American
people don’t get too decide how their tax dollars get allocated by holding
members of Congress accountable through elections. Instead, there would be some
board that would make these decisions for us.”
“Where
would a person even come up with these ideas?
How does it even happen that it occurs to someone to think of these things?
Maybe a contributing factor could be if a person grew up in the former Soviet
Union and went to Moscow State University and attended on a V.I. Lenin academic
scholarship.”
“In
2019, she tweeted, ‘say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay
gap there. Market doesn’t always know best.’ She followed up with another
tweet, ‘I never claimed women and men were treated absolutely equally in every
facet of Soviet life. But people’s salaries were set (by the state) in a
gender-blind manner. And all women got very generous maternity benefits. Both
things are still a pipe dream in our society!’”
“Ms.
Omarova clearly knows her views are far outside of the mainstream. How
do we know? Well, why else would her most recent CV have been scrubbed of one
particular item that was on her resume as recently as 2017? That item is
the thesis she wrote as a student at Moscow on a V.I. Lenin Personal Academic
Scholarship. The title was ‘Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of
Revolution in The Capital.’”
“This
morning, I released a letter that I sent to Ms. Omarova requesting she provide
a copy of this paper in the original Russian to the Committee in time for us to
translate it so that we can fully consider her nomination. Like most
committees, the Banking Committee requires nominees provide copies of any
articles or papers they’ve written. That is a very important tool we use to
evaluate a person’s thoughts, fitness, temperament, judgment. I’m looking
forward to receiving that paper.”
“In
a country as big as ours where we have 330 some million people, I have no
doubt that there are some individuals that we could find here and there who
would think of the Soviet Union—that brutal, oppressive, totalitarian,
freedom-suppressing, soul-sucking, murderous regime that was the Soviet Union—there
must be some people somewhere in America that somehow would compare it
favorably to the United States, as shocking as that is. What never
occurred to me is that a person who thinks that way could possibly be
considered for an important, powerful, and prominent position in the Federal
government.”
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