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“The Stench of Religious Bigotry”
Republicans are stonewalling the confirmation of Muslim-American tech entrepreneur Dilawar Syed. Democrats have a theory as to why.
Defenders of obstructionist Republican Senators are running out of excuses as fast as Senate Republicans are running out of reasons to obstruct Biden’s SBA nominee Dilawar Syed.
Republicans have been gorging themselves on a moveable feast of goalposts since March, basing their objections to Mr. Syed around any number of nebulous accusations. That most of these have fallen along hot-button cultural lines reveals a great deal about what’s really behind this politically-motivated stonewall.
None of the objections have amounted to much, but that hasn’t stopped Republican Senators from coming up with new and novel ways to harass Dilawar Syed while preventing small business owners from getting all the COVID-19 relief funds they need from the SBA.
After other lines of bad-faith inquiry collapsed, including attempts to malign Dilawar Syed as someone with a bias against Israel and insinuations that Mr. Syed’s birthplace of Pakistan is somehow a strike against him, Republicans latched onto COVID-19 relief loans made to Planned Parenthood.
Raising the specter of abortion might be good for political campaigns, but tying old SBA loans to the nomination of Dilawar…