Better in their words…

In her years before the Twitter mast, Ms. Tanden tweeted that Mitch McConnell was “Voldemort” and “Moscow Mitch,” compared Ted Cruz unfavorably to vampires, called Tom Cotton a “fraud,” said that Bernie Sanders —a frequent Tanden target—was helped by Russia in the 2016 Democratic primaries, and called Sen. Collins’s reasons for voting to confirm then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh a “pathetically bad faith argument as cover for President Trump’s vicious attacks on survivors of sexual assault.”

For readers by now wondering how the phrases “Neera Tanden” and “U.S. budget director” fit together, let it be noted that Ms. Tanden was once president of the Center for American Progress, a left-of-center think tank that has published fact-filled policy papers on public issues. Which is to say that in an earlier life, Ms. Tanden was a serious person. Then she discovered Twitter.

Amid Ms. Tanden’s current crucible, it has been reported that in preparation for her confirmation hearings, she deleted 1,000 of her Twitter account’s 88,000 tweets. A thousand deleted tweets???!!! Does Twitter have a tool for scanning and erasing a user’s tweets, which on second or third thought were a bad idea?

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says it will be hypocritical if Ms. Tanden is defeated for a cabinet post by Republicans who “looked the other way” from Donald Trump’s all-through-the-night Twitter rants, which by the way, the New York Times took the time to compile last month as “The Complete List of Trump’s Twitter Insults (2015-2021).”

In fact, rather than turn a blind eye to Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed, everyone begged him in public and private to stop doing it, but he refused, insisting this was how he “communicated” with his base. Who can doubt it? But the belligerence of his tweets contributed to the erosion of Mr. Trump’s re-election support among suburban voters, who simply couldn’t take it any more. Neera Tanden isn’t setting any precedent as a high-level Twitter self-immolator. She’ll always be No. 2.

Beyond self-destruction, a more serious concern is the implication for free speech of disqualifying people for what they have said (or tweeted).

I think calling Mitch McConnell “Voldemort” is kind of funny and fair game—just as the connotative effect of calling Sen. Schumer “Chuck” makes sense. Columns of political opinion, one may have noticed, would be out of business if they had to be written in patty-cake prose.

But it’s hard to credit progressives’ complaints about punishing Ms. Tanden for free, if ill-considered, speech when they have transformed what people say—going back to writings in college—into a justification for routine political and personal destruction. When that stops, the free-speech dialogues can begin.

No one would understand better than Ms. Tanden, a famously hardball political player, that you pays your money and you takes your chances. She took hers with this endless stream of insults against U.S. senators.

I think Sens. Manchin, Collins and Portman are concerned about something beyond Ms. Tanden’s OMB nomination. Mr. Manchin has become famous recently for saying he won’t vote to end the legislative filibuster, as has fellow Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Actively protecting the Senate’s prerogatives is an overdue step toward not letting the legislative branch become moribund in an era when national policy is increasingly set by whoever wins the presidency, as in Joe Biden’s stream of executive orders and those of the two presidents before him.

Sen. Manchin, explaining his opposition to Ms. Tanden, said her “toxic” tweets would impair her ability to work with Congress as budget director. That assumes she has much interest in working with Congress, which I doubt. Diminishing the role of the legislative branch is a progressive goal dating back to Woodrow Wilson, as Ms. Tanden surely knows. She has little use for Congress, which would explain why she was so dismissive of even Sen. Sanders and why she reflexively mocked senators. It’s not them personally but their institution that is an impediment to her force-fed agenda.

The Center for American Progress was the originator of the arguments for Barack Obama’s unilateral pen-and-phone authority. That expertise is why Joe Biden, or someone, wanted her at OMB. She published the blueprints for ignoring Congress.

A vote to defeat her isn’t personal. It’s about making sure the Senate still matters.

Write henninger@wsj.com.