Senate confirms Biden AG and HUD selections
Merrick Garland (pictured) takes reins as attorney general; Ohio’s Marcia Fudge to lead Housing and Urban Development.
The Senate has confirmed Marcia Fudge to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, placing the longtime Ohio lawmaker in charge of the agency just as Congress passed new benefits for renters and homeowners who have suffered economic losses amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Fudge, who has represented parts of Cleveland and Akron in the House since 2008, is a former mayor and a longtime advocate for assistance for the needy. She said at her confirmation hearing in January that her first priority would be protecting
the millions of people who have fallen behind on rent or mortgages due to loss of income during the pandemic, telling senators that “we cannot afford to allow people in the midst of a pandemic to be put in the streets.”
Her confirmation, 66-34, comes as the Senate is approving a slate of President Joe Biden’s nominees.
Fudge won bipartisan support for her nomination, including from Sen. Mitch McConnell, who said he would support her and Garland.
“These aren’t the nom- inees that any Republican would have picked for these jobs,” McConnell said ahead of the vote. “But the nation needs presidents to be able to stand up a team so long as their nominees are qualified and mainstream.”
Republicans who opposed Fudge’s nomination argued that she was also out of the mainstream. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey criticized some of Fudge’s past comments about Repub- licans, saying they could have a “toxic and detrimen- tal impact on the working relationship that ought to be a constructive relationship” between Congress and the Biden administration.
Toomey referenced a statement Fudge made last year when GOP senators moved to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg after blocking Obama’s nominee — Garland four years earlier.
Fudge at the time called Republicans “a disgrace to this nation” and said they “have no decency, they have no honor, they have no integrity.”
At her confirmation hearing, Fudge did not walk back any of her previous statements but described herself as “one of the most bipartisan members in the House of Representatives.”
Democrats argued that Fudge’s experience was right for the times. Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who lives in Fudge’s district, noted that parts of the area suffered a disproportionate num- ber of foreclosures before the economic crisis a decade ago.
“She knows how for decades, communities have watched as factories closed, investment dried up, and storefronts were boarded over,” he said. “And she knows how many neighborhoods and towns have never had the investment they should – because of discrimi- nation, because of redlining, because of decades of policy that funneled resources and jobs away from Black and brown communities.”