In
the United States Congress, MCs have a fine line to walk. Not simply the line between acting as a
representative for the people of a home state and acting as a legislator in one
of the most powerful nations on Earth, but also the line between fighting
uphill battles for bills that many do not want to see passed and accepting
defeat for the purpose of building alliances and building political capital. Indeed, many senators are content with
playing it safe in order to ensure that they do not offend their constituents,
or, even worse, their financial backers. Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand,
has never been content to play it safe.
She will fight tirelessly for what she believes is right. A
staunch defender of the middle class, she has been called “a symbol” in the
fight against unregulated business and profiteering CEOs and she has been
called “the Devil incarnate” by those very same CEOs with whom she has gone toe
to toe on more than one occasion. She
has truly earned both titles. For in her
time in politics, she has never backed down from a challenge; never shied away
from an opportunity to fight against a Wall Street powerhouse which in 2008
brought the world to its knees.
Warren
was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012 and began her tenure in January of
2013. She is a Democrat from Massachusetts, and despite her incredibly short
tenure in Congress, she is already well known on Capitol Hill. She is seen as a
friend to many, and has made more than a few powerful enemies. Born to a poor working class family in
Oklahoma City in 1949, Warren quickly distinguished herself as cunning debater.
At just sixteen years old, she won the title of Oklahoma’s Top High School
Debater and was given a full scholarship to George Washington University in
Washington DC. At nineteen, she left GW
to marry her first husband Jim Warren. The two moved to Texas where she
finished her degree at the University of Houston. She received her law degree from Rutgers School of Law in 1970 and spent
three decades as a professor at a number of colleges and universities including
the University of Texas, the University of Michigan, the University of
Pennsylvania and ultimately became a tenured professor of law at Harvard. Specializing in bankruptcy law, she is one of
America’s foremost experts on the subject.
It was not until 1995
that Warren began her career in politics as a member of the National Bankruptcy
Review Commission (NBRC). She was a
self-identified Republican
until she joined the Commission. She,
like many, believed that the people filing for bankruptcy were simply trying to
cheat the system; trying to shirk their debts and avoid responsibility. It was not until she saw first-hand as a
member of the NBRC that those filing for bankruptcy were, all too often,
hardworking, middle class families.
After this epiphany, Warren made an almost complete turnaround. She went from blaming people filing for
bankruptcy for attempting to game the system, to fighting against congressional legislation seeking to limit people’s ability
to file for bankruptcy. Eventually, this
proved fruitless. In 2005, ten years
after she joined the commission, Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse
Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.
This act made it significantly more difficult for people to file for bankruptcy protection and was
hailed at the time as the greatest victory for the banking lobby of all time.
Despite this defeat,
Warren’s conviction never faltered. After
the collapse of the banking industry and the recession in 2008, she was
appointed by Harry Reid to be one of the five chairs on the new Congressional
Oversight Panel (COP) which was created to oversee the implementation of the
Emergency Economic Stabilization Act.
Her duties were to evaluate the bailout of the banks and the
effectiveness of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds. It was acting as the chairperson for this
committee that Warren really began to make herself known in Washington, both
for good and for ill. She grilled
government officials, demanded accountability, and generally made it her
mission to turn her committee into the scourge of unregulated banking. Her
prowess as a debater shone brilliantly during her time on the COP. One memorable instance was when grilling
treasury secretary Timothy Geithner in 2009 about the use of TARP funds in a
video that was labeled on YouTube as “Elizabeth Warren Makes Timothy Geithner
Squirm.” Warren refused to sit back
while taxpayer money which was intended to prevent the collapse of our
financial institution was used instead to line the pockets of CEOs.
The accountability of
government and the regulation of business has been the main drive of Elizabeth
Warren since she entered politics. For her,
there is no question that it is the middle class which made America great, and
without a more robust strategy for consumer protection, the middle class would
be allowed to drown while banks continue to make record profits. This was her rationale when becoming an
early, ardent defender of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act
commonly known as “Dodd-Frank.” This act was designed to ensure accountability
for financial institutions, create transparency and eliminate the idea of “too
big to fail.” It would also establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
(CFPB). Despite a veritable flood of lobbyists from the banking industry,
Dodd-Frank was signed into law in 2010.
Like many of Warren’s fights, the fight for Dodd-Frank was uphill all the
way. The fight over it was so fierce that even Chris Dodd, one of the bill’s
sponsors was willing to make huge concessions which threatened the
effectiveness and the very integrity of the bill, but not Elizabeth
Warren. In her own words, when speaking about
the fight over the CFPB to Huffington Post, she said “My first choice is a
strong consumer agency, my second choice is no agency at all and plenty of
blood and teeth left on the floor.” Even after it passed, Dodd-Frank’s Republican opponents in the senate
threatened to block any presidential
appointment for the director of the CFPB.
Likely trying to avoid an uphill fight, himself, President Obama passed
over Warren for the role of director, despite the fact the she was commonly
agreed to be the ideal candidate for the job by those who supported the
creation of the bureau in the first place. There has been much speculation that
it was the fact that she had accrued so many enemies (chief among them Timothy
Geithner) which convinced Obama to choose someone else.
After less than a year
as a special advisor to the CFPB, Warren left and announced her intention to
run for Senate. She defeated Republican
incumbent Scott Brown who had held the position since he won a special election
in 2010 after the death of Ted Kennedy.
The campaign was an interesting one.
Brown was funded primarily by the financial industry, investment banks
and the like, while an astonishing 97% of Warren’s campaign funds came from
donations of under $100. The middle
class seemed to see that Warren
was in their corner, while banks also realized that she was decidedly not in theirs. Both candidates took what has become known as
“the peoples pledge”, an agreement to not accept any campaign funding from
Super PACs. While neither did, Warren’s
funding did come from the people almost exclusively. True to her message that she works for the
people.
While she has only been
in the Senate for less than a
year, Elizabeth Warren has not strayed from her path or wavered in her
convictions. She has sponsored bills like the 21st Century
Glass-Steagall Act which would force a separation between bank’s investment
arms and their commercial banking arms.
This would ensure that banks’ risky gambling with investments would not
become a threat to the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people
who do business with them. She also sponsored the Bank on Student Loan Fairness
Act. Which would allow students to get federal Stafford loans with a .75%
interest rate (the same rate the Federal Reserve charges banks to borrow
money). While her focus is clearly at
the federal level, fighting hard to ensure that our economic system is once
again working like it should, Warren has not neglected her constituents in
Massachusetts. She attended a rally a
week ago where she called light to the fact that there have been over 100
shootings in Boston alone since the bombings at the marathon in April. She called these shooting an epidemic and
called for stronger national gun laws. For Warren, however, a strong and
unassailable defense of the middle class is recognizing the needs of her
constituents. This was clear from the
outpouring of support that she received in the form of small donations to her
campaign.
As a new senator,
Elizabeth Warren is just learning the rules of the game. She is learning the
intricacies of the Senate and its traditions and procedures. In some cases, a senator can be broken by
this process; they can fall into line.
An MC could decide that it is better to make friends and allies by avoiding
big fights. Alternatively, they can
forgo this diplomatic process and stick to their guns. If Elizabeth Warren as a senator is anything
like she was before, it seems unlikely that she will shy away from the big
fights, even if it does mean making a few more enemies on the hill.
No comments:
Post a Comment