Senator has to clarify he didn’t mean to call Bernie Sanders an ‘ignorant slut’

He was in the midst of chastising a White House nominee for her past language

In another august moment in the world’s greatest deliberative body, as senators are fond of calling it, senator John Kennedy had to explain on Wednesday he didn’t mean to call Bernie Sanders “an ignorant slut.”

During a Wednesday morning confirmation hearing, Mr Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, was chastising Neera Tanden, the Biden administration’s nominee for White House Office of Management and Budget director, over language in her past tweets slamming Mr Sanders and others that “disturbed” him. 

“You’ve called Senator Sanders everything but an ignorant slut,” he said, an apparent reference to an old Saturday Night Live skit. 

“That is not true,” Ms Tanden, former head of the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress (CAP), responded.

“I want the record to reflect that I did not call Senator Sanders an ignorant slut,” senator Kennedy added, leaving his colleague at a loss for words.

“I don’t know how I could take that, Senator Kennedy,” Mr Sanders said.

After four years of vicious Trump verbal attacks culminated in a literal one, Ms Tanden’s past language online has received heightened scrutiny during her confirmation process.

She has apologized multiple times during the hearings for her past tweets, roughly 1,000 of which she deleted in November, where she called the Vermont progressive “crazy,” while comparing Ted Cruz to a vampire and Mitch McConnell to Voldemort, the ghoulish villain of the Harry Potter series. 

“My language and my expressions on social media caused hurt to people, and I feel badly about that,” she said on Wednesday.

Senators also grilled her about the think tank’s corporate donors, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable initiative, as well as her support for various liberal priorities. She said she backs a $15-an-hour minimum wage, lowering medicare eligibility to age 60, free public college tuition for low-income families, and and universal pre-K. 

In recent weeks, she also had a long personal sit-down meeting with Mr Sanders, the budget committee chairman, to discuss her nomination.

CAP is one of Washington’s most prominent liberal thinktanks.

It attracted controversy in 2019 after shutter its entire news division, ThinkProgress, and firing its staff, who had unionized. The organization said the decision was due to fiscal challenges.