In the evenly divided Senate, their votes are essential to Omarova’s confirmation.

The OCC, a branch of the U.S. Treasury, polices banks chartered by National Bank Act and other financial institutions.

Republicans have made an issue of Omarova, a Kazakhstan native, having grown up in Soviet times, as well as her academic papers advocating a fundamental overhaul of the financial system and her remarks about letting smaller energy companies go bankrupt as the economy turns to a greener future.

According to her biography on the Cornell Law School website, Omarova received an undergraduate degree at Moscow State University before getting a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin and a law degree at Northwestern.

Biden’s Banking Watchdog Pick Gets Mired in Political Spectacle

Before joining the Cornell faculty, she worked at the Treasury during the George W. Bush administration and at Davis Polk, & Wardwell in New York.

In October, Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the Banking Committee, pointed out that her college scholarship was named for Lenin. He took to the floor to demand a copy “in the original Russian” of a paper that focused on Marxism.

Earlier this week, he told Bloomberg Television she was unacceptable because of her previous support for policies that he labeled “socialist.”

Omarova has described herself as a “free-market idealist.”

“I know that Soviet-style communism doesn’t work,” she said. “I’ve lived through it. That system was deeply flawed. It’s dead.”