After four-plus years of either pretending not to notice or, with few exceptions, dismissing the significance of former president Donald Trump’s litany of vitriolic tweets, Senate Republicans are suddenly social media critics, particularly fussy about what they consider out of bounds for the raucous public square of Twitter.
But hypocritical as that was, it was plausible, at least, to say that Tanden has thrown a few sharp elbows on Twitter. Now? Republicans are recycling the mean-tweets attack on Biden nominees whose tweets aren’t even mean — they’re just harsh truths. After Tanden, Republicans have figured out how to rig the confirmation game: No need to address their party’s recent track record if they can put the spotlight on their critics; no need to address the substance of what those critics are saying if you can complain about how they said it. They’ve learned that harping on harsh tweets is a winning strategy.
For example, Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) have criticized Vanita Gupta, Biden’s nominee for associate attorney general, for tweeting her reaction to the 2020 GOP convention: “Don’t know if I can take three more nights of racism, xenophobia, and outrageous lies.” But her tweet was right on the merits, and the language appropriate. During Trump’s tenure, before and after the convention, Republican rhetoric was suffused with xenophobia. In December, Blackburn tweeted, “China has a 5,000 year history of cheating and stealing.” In his convention speech, Trump boasted about building his border wall and called Biden “a Trojan horse for socialism.” The convention itself, according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, “offered a cascade of false claims.” Republicans especially bristle at Gupta’s charge of racism, but between their party’s efforts at voter suppression, hostility toward Black Lives Matter and Trump’s routine race-baiting, Gupta had good reason to make that claim.
Blackburn and others also take umbrage at Gupta’s tweet admonishing Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) for “sending a dangerous message” by supporting Brett M. Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court after he was accused of sexual assault. But Gupta’s assessment only mirrored that of a wide range of women’s rights groups and elected Democrats. And these delicate sensibilities are certainly new — when she was on the campaign trail, Blackburn struck a defiant tone and suggested she didn’t mind heat from critics: “I know the left calls me a wing nut,” she said, “or a knuckle-dragging conservative. And you know what? I say that’s all right, bring it on.”
Gupta has apologized for her “harsh tone.” But while her tweets are opinionated, they’re still well within the bounds of strong but civil discourse — there’s no hyperbole or name-calling, they aren’t vulgar, and most of what she said in them isn’t really a matter of dispute.
And it’s not just Gupta. In a swipe at Colin Kahl, Biden’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) highlighted a Kahl tweet quoting New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, who wrote: “The coronavirus is a natural disaster. The Republican Party’s death-cult fealty to Trump is wholly man-made.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) piled on, saying that Kahl used “hateful rhetoric.”
Kahl’s tweet was a direct quote, so it’s already a stretch to ascribe those words to him. But even if Republicans go that route, the quote was right: Republicans in Congress sat by last year as Trump mocked mask wearers, eschewed social distancing, contradicted public health experts and hedged at using the full weight of the federal government to combat the pandemic. More than half a million Americans are now dead from the coronavirus, and according to a study published last month, Trump’s “inept and insufficient” approach was among the reasons for finding that 40 percent of those deaths were preventable.
Let’s face it: Tweets aren’t the issue. This is about the mirror being held up to Republican failures.
It’s also about who’s doing the tweeting. Women who are assertive and opinionated, particularly women of color, don’t accord with our deeply held biases about how professional women should comport themselves. In that context, it’s hard to ignore that Gupta is the second South Asian American woman in recent weeks to have her Twitter history picked apart during a Senate confirmation battle.
Gupta — who has already served as acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division — is highly qualified, but she’s also an outspoken progressive, someone whose politics Republicans don’t like. They seem to think they’re entitled to dictate that Biden, a moderate Democrat duly elected by the American people, should name appointees who agree more with them, not with members of the president’s own party. It’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose theory of governance that is, in the end, anti-democratic.
Democrats opposed the politics of nearly all of Trump’s Cabinet appointees and high-level executive branch appointees, but some of the most controversial among them were confirmed anyway. Trump’s attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William P. Barr, were about as partisan as it gets: one a former Republican senator and the other on his second tour as AG in a Republican administration. Then, partisanship wasn’t an issue for Republicans. Which is fair enough: politics, including Cabinet picks, are partisan.
But a functional political system requires that all parties abide by the same basic rules. That’s where Republican hypocrisy does such damage. Yes, senators have a constitutional advice-and-consent role. They have an obligation to reject nominees who are unfit for the jobs for which they are nominated. They have a right to interrogate the views of nominees who seek confirmation. But a double standard — one set of rules for Democrats, one for Republicans — is the kind of gamesmanship that keeps Washington so broken.
This outcome — a new norm of torpedoing by Twitter — was always the risk when Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) let Republicans tank Tanden. Now, it’s not just mean tweets at issue. Earnest, well-reasoned ones are being judged as beyond the pale just for using accurate language to describe the damage done during Trump’s administration. That’s bad for Democrats; it’s worse for public discourse. Republicans are levying a high cost from anyone who sharply criticizes them and then hopes to work in the new administration. And they’re hoping no one notices what motivates their cynical charade.
