Sen. Lisa Murkowski on Wednesday said she was surprised to learn that President Biden’s nominee for White House budget director, Neera Tanden, once attacked her as being “high” on her “own supply.”
The resurfaced mean tweet against the centrist Alaska Republican could help seal Tanden’s fate as a failed nominee to lead the White House Office of Management and Budget. The White House must win at least one Republican vote in the evenly divided Senate after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WVa.) said he opposes Tanden.
“Really? I didn’t know,” Murkowski told reporters on Capitol Hill when told that she had been trashed by Tanden in a 2017 tweet objecting to her support for a tax-cut bill that lowered corporate tax rates.
Tanden retweeted Murkowski at the time, writing, “No offense but this sounds like you’re high on your own supply. You know, we know, and everyone knows this is all garbage. Just stop.”
Murkowski told reporters she knew that Tanden attacked her colleagues, but not that she was among the subjects of the mean message from Tanden, who leads the Democratic Party-aligned Center for American Progress.
“High on my own supply? That’s interesting. Should I ask her, ‘My own supply of what?'” the senator said.
Murkowski said that she had not spoken with Tanden about her nomination and asked reporters, “What is she responding to? What did I say?”
A journalist told Murkowski that Tanden was criticizing her over “the GOP tax bill at the time.”
Murkowski replied, “Oh, the tax bill that actually helped people in my state and helped us open ANWR [to oil drilling]?
“Ok, well now see that goes to show how much homework I still have to do on her if I didn’t even know that she had sent out a tweet about me.”
Murkowski said that White House staff members had spoke with her about Tanden’s nomination and that “I suggested to the White House that my colleagues were being very critical of the statements and rightly so. I think some of them were clearly over the top. It seems that in this world we’ve kind of gotten numb to derogatory tweets. I don’t think that that’s a model that we want to set for anybody, whether it’s a nominee, whether it’s a president or whether it’s a senator.”
Murkowski added, “I was trying to look at competence but apparently I’m going to have to do more looking into what she thinks about me.”
Fellow centrist Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah said this week they oppose Tanden over her tweets.
Tanden recently deleted more than 1,000 tweets that attacked GOP senators but also trashed the 2016 presidential bid of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as Russia’s choice against Democratic Party favorite Hillary Clinton. The message attacking Murkowski was not deleted.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) reminded Tanden at one of her confirmation hearings, “You wrote that Susan Collins is ‘the worst’, that Tom Cotton is a fraud, that vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz, you called Leader McConnell ‘Moscow Mitch’ and Voldemort.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) quipped, “You called Sen. Sanders everything but an ignorant slut.”