Sen. Bob Menendez: Biden Has Chosen Not to Appoint Latinos to the Fed

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) used a Senate Banking Committee hearing with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Tuesday to excoriate President Joe Biden for not appointing more Latinos to the Federal Reserve board.

Menendez, who has a committee vote for Fed nominees, has long asked the Biden administration to nominate someone of Hispanic descent for the Fed.

Apparently fed up with the Biden administration, he used his opening statement to call for Biden to nominate a Latino to the Federal Reserve board.

He said:

There are more than 62 million Latinos that call the United States home. We are the largest minority group in the country. We account for nearly 20 percent of the United States population. We contribute almost three trillion dollars in GDP. Yet, Latinos have no representation in the Federal Reserve’s leadership. In the 109 years history of the Federal Reserve, there has never, never, been a single member of the board of governors or regional bank presidents who has the lived experience of being a Latino in the United States, and in practice, that means that the voices of nearly one-fifth of our country’s people are repeatedly drowned out when the Fed is making critical decisions on economic policy.”

Menendez slammed the Biden administration for not nominating one Latino since the beginning of his administration.

This would not be the first time that Democrats have sought to fill an open Federal Reserve position to purportedly check an ethnic and/or gender box.

Senate Banking Committee Chair Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and other committee Democrats have cheered the confirmation of Dr. Lisa Cook to the Federal Reserve board of governors. Democrats were ecstatic that they were able to confirm Cook, who is now the first black woman Fed governor, and that her background as a Ph.D. in economics and a professor would bring a different perspective to the powerful Federal Reserve board.

Cook has a history of Black Lives Matter bullying and according to internal Michigan State University documents obtained by Breitbart News, Cook may have been promoted to a full professorship even though she had been rejected for that position.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson remarked during the nomination process for Cook, “But, administrators at Michigan State granted her tenure anyway in the name of equity and equity is what Lisa Cook could bring to the Fed.”

The Federal Reserve nominee also agreed with calls to have the Federal Reserve focus on targeting its federal funds to improve the black employment rate instead of the national employment rate.

Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.