Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. The most amusing part of this spin is Jen Psaki asking for clarification on an obvious question. With two Senate committees bailing on a vote for Neera Tanden, isn’t it time for Joe Biden to go to Plan B?

What is Plan B, Psaki responds … while eyeballing her briefing book the entire way:

White House Press Secretary Psaki says there is still no plan to have a new nominee replace Neera Tanden as OMB director despite a canceled vote for her confirmation. https://t.co/rItpGkfy9h pic.twitter.com/iPGeMNqPG3

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) February 24, 2021

“That’s not the stage we’re in,” Psaki answers. Au contraire. Had Kyrsten Sinema told Gary Peters that she would support Tanden, the HSGAC would have taken that vote at 10 am this morning. The postponement can only mean that Sinema is not committed to supporting Tanden, and that Peters didn’t want to embarrass the White House with a bipartisan rejection in committee. That strategy exists to give any White House time to formulate a Plan B, even if they decide to operate in parallel to rescue their Plan A.

One other point should be noted. Psaki this time didn’t pull out the bigot card by hailing Tanden’s ethnicity and sex as a reason to confirm her. Perhaps the White House got some pushback on their attempts to smear opposition to Tanden’s confirmation as racist/sexist. In its place, however, is a claim that Tanden is an apparently indispensable “expert.” How would Tanden have any special expertise that couldn’t be duplicated by hundreds of former members of Congress? In fact, this position would be better suited to someone with that already on their resumé — rather than the need to scrub hundreds of attack tweets in order to work with the very members of Congress that Tanden spent the last decade denigrating.

The longer this goes on, the more embarrassing this will get. Tanden should be enough of a team player to pull the plug and get a non-confirmation position in the White House instead.