This video of Senator Elizabeth Warren putting the hurt on a bunch of regulators in her first hearing on the Senate Banking Committee is pretty amusing. I’m a big fan of the clip that starts at about 2:30, when Warren asks Tom Curry, who heads a little regulatory agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, why the OCC hasn’t taken more Wall Street banks to trial, rather than settling out of court and getting them to pay a penalty when they break the law, and Curry hems and haws and can’t really answer, so he basically goes full Milton from Office Space and then just kind of trails off and sulks.
Even though Wall Street bankers weren’t the target of Warren’s interrogation yesterday — the regulators who oversee them were — the financial industry is apparently freaking out about the hearing, on the theory that it augurs a tough road for them ahead in dealing with Warren as a senator. Ben White got some quotes from scared financial industry executives who called her performance “shameless grandstanding” and accused her of competing with Ted Cruz for the title of “most extreme fringe freshman senator.”
Which raises the question: Are these people kidding?
Nearly two years after Wall Street waged a successful campaign to keep consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren from running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the incoming senator will be tapped to serve on the Banking Committee, according to four sources familiar with the situation. It’s a victory for progressives who battled to win her a seat on the panel that oversees the implementation of Dodd-Frank and other banking regulations.
Warren knocked out Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts in the most expensive Senate contest of 2012, with Wall Street spending heavily to beat Warren, a former Harvard law professor.
Sources also told HuffPost that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) will be named to the panel.
Warren’s ascension to the panel gives her influence over regulators and the industry that non-panel members don’t enjoy.
As Daily Intel’s Kevin Roose notes, Warren is likelier to take her time building a network of ideological kin than to take a one-woman stab at the financial establishment right off the bat:
After my piece on Wall Street’s worries about Warren ran last week, I got a call from a senior banking industry lobbyist, who contended that Warren herself wasn’t planning to come into the Senate and immediately begin pushing an anti-bank agenda. Her more likely tactic, he said, would be to slow-play the situation, quietly amassing power and influence among fellow senators at first and then going after the banks once a coalition had been established.
“She realizes that if she appears to be a caricature of herself, she won’t be super-relevant in the Senate,” the lobbyist said.
Whatever her strategy, this is good news for progressive observers, who worried that Senate Democrats — always a weak and unreliable bunch — would cave under pressure from their Wall Street backers and keep Warren off the committee.
On one level, John McCain’s attack-dog approach to the possible nomination of UN ambassador Susan Rice as Secretary of State falls in line with the ex-maverick’s curmudgeonly stance on everything these days. Ever since losing the 2008 presidential contest (in reality, even somewhat before the actual election itself), McCain has retreated from his previously commendable independent streak and become an archetype of the modern Republican Party: obstinate and incoherent all at once.
Today, after Rice called for an in-person meeting with Republican senators McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte, all three officials emerged from the closed-doors conversation speaking as if with one voice:
“We are significantly troubled by many of the answers that we got, and some that we didn’t get,” Senator John McCain of Arizona said to reporters. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said, “Bottom line: I’m more concerned than I was before” — a sentiment echoed by Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire.
Their statements – coming after Ms. Rice’s conciliatory remarks during a meeting designed to mend fences with her three critics and smooth the way for her nomination as secretary of state if President Obama decides on her as the successor to Hillary Rodham Clinton – attested to the bitterness of the feud between the White House and Republicans over Benghazi.
Mr. Graham and Ms. Ayotte said that knowing what they know now, they would place a hold on Ms. Rice’s nomination if Mr. Obama selected her.
“I wouldn’t vote for anybody being nominated out of the Benghazi debacle until I had answers about what happened that I don’t have today,” Mr. Graham said.
Of course, Rice has rather consistently stated that she had simply repeated what she’d heard from the intelligence community. There’s very little actual substance for such a major controversy (fanned, in large part, by conservative outlets such as FOX News, as I covered yesterday).
That said, one factor that has been consistently under-covered during this ongoing saga is the choice President Obama must make for Secretary of State. All indications are that Susan Rice and John Kerry are the frontrunners. In that Elizabeth Warren just reclaimed Massachusetts’ second U.S. Senate seat from Republican Scott Brown (who remains popular in the state despite his defeat), moving Kerry to the executive cabinet means that yet another senatorial election would have to take place in the state.
Democrats are nervous (even if they won’t admit it publicly) about their chances. Despite being overwhelmingly liberal, Massachusetts may not have completely forgiven Martha Coakley for her abysmal campaign in the special election against Brown in 2009-2010. And aside from her, the Democratic field is fairly weak in the state. Brown, meanwhile, continues to enjoy relatively broad popularity and would be a natural (and well-known) contender for the seat.
Therefore, it is possible that John McCain (along with Graham, Ayotte, et al) should be given some credit for strategy here. By coming down so hard on Susan Rice, he may be hoping to force Obama’s hand by making Kerry the de facto lone candidate for Secretary of State and, therefore, opening up a potential Senate gain for Republicans in Massachusetts. Thus, instead of simply succumbing to his baser instincts to criticize everything Democrats do, he may only be guilty of succumbing to his party’s electoral ambitions: a distinction hardly worthy of sainthood, to be sure, but certainly well in line with the behavior of virtually everyone else in Congress.
And rightly so. These days, the fight has moved from her Senate candidacy to a battle over her possible appointment to the Senate banking committee:
Not even two weeks have passed since Democrat Elizabeth Warren rode a wave of grassroots support to victory in the US Senate race in Massachusetts, ousting Republican incumbent Scott Brown. Senator-elect Warren has not yet hired her staff. She has not yet moved into her Senate office. But the banking industry is already taking aim at her, scurrying to curb her future clout on Capitol Hill.
Lobbyists and trade groups for Wall Street and other major banking players are pressuring lawmakers to deny Warren a seat on the powerful Senate banking committee. With the impending departures of Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.) and Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), Democrats have two spots to fill on the committee before the 113th Congress gavels in next year. Warren has yet said whether she wants to serve on the committee. But she would be a natural: she’s a bankruptcy law expert, she served as Congress’ lead watchdog overseeing the $700 billion bank bailout from 2008 to 2010, and she conceived of and helped launch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
But the big banks are not fans of Warren, and their representatives in Washington have her in their crosshairs. Aides to two senators on the banking committee tell Mother Jones the industry has already moved to block Warren from joining the committee, which is charged with drafting legislation regulating much of the financial industry. “Downtown”—shorthand for Washington’s lobbying corridor—”has been going nuts” to keep her off the committee, another Senate aide says.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a banking committee member, has been angling to get Warren on the committee, “but there are many bank lobbyists pushing to keep her off,” a top Democratic Senate aide told Politico‘s Morning Money tipsheet. But the aide added, “If she really wants banking, it will be very tough politically to keep her off.”
Several banking trade groups—including the American Bankers Association, Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, and the Mortgage Bankers Association—declined or didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Warren also declined to comment.
The big banks’ opposition to Warren, a fierce consumer advocate, is no shocker. She supported the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and she blasted Brown, who did vote for Dodd-Frank, for launching a “guerrilla war” to undermine its implementation. She backs the Volcker Rule, a limit on how much banks can trade with their own money. What may trouble the big banks most is Warren’s call for revisiting the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated riskier investment banks from more staid commercial banks. Reinstating Glass-Steagall would mean breaking up sprawling Wall Street institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America.
This is an important moment for the Democratic Party. Its leaders — specifically, Harry Reid, who makes the committee appointments — have a great opportunity to try to demonstrate that they are not beholden to their myriad financial interests and that they do support the sterling work done by Elizabeth Warren to protect consumers and hold financial firms accountable. If they cave on this one, as they very well might, it will be a bad omen for this next session of Congress generally on all sorts of issues.
Speculation is heating up that Massachusetts U.S. Senator John Kerry may be named to a Cabinet-level post in Obama’s second term: most likely either State or Defense. This has prompted a cascade of worries that the Democrats are making an unforced error and may lose a Senate seat if they can’t field an able candidate to replace Kerry in Massachusetts. (This is especially concerning given recently defeated Senator Scott Brown’s persistent popularity.) Dan Amira at New York Magazinemakes this point:
As everyone is aware, Kerry’s elevation to a cabinet post would open up a Senate seat in Massachusetts, providing the just-defeated Scott Brown with an opportunity to rejoin the Senate without even having to take on an incumbent. Why would Republicans do anything to dissuade Obama from setting this chain of events in motion? Do they have a personal vendetta against Brown, despite his unique position as the only Republican in the entire state of Massachusetts capable of winning a Senate seat? First, GOP senators blocked Elizabeth Warren’s confirmation to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, thus freeing her up for an ultimately successful run against Brown. And now the potential opposition to Kerry’s nomination, Brown’s only route back to the Senate for the foreseeable future.
Of course, any discussion of the hypothetical nomination’s bad political strategy can’t exclude President Obama, who should be hesitant about the idea of Secretary Kerry for the same reason that the GOP should be thrilled. Yes, the Democrats gained two seats last week, bumping their majority up to 55. According to the Washington Post, administration officials believe that the gains “provided a cushion that allowed them to consider Kerry’s departure from the chamber.”
But why risk diminishing the Democratic majority at all when there are plenty of other suitable would-be defense secretaries who aren’t sitting senators? Just to reward a friend? That probably won’t seem worthwhile if an important piece of legislation ever falls one vote short of passage and Scott Brown is the deciding no vote — an admittedly unlikely but hardly impossible scenario.
As the Democrats try to game out the risk of opening up the Kerry seat, the key factor to consider is context—that is, the circumstances in which the election to replace him would be held. Martha Coakley lost to Brown in 2010 in part because she was a deeply underwhelming candidate and because Brown offered a certain boy-next-door appeal. But she lost mainly because she was running in a low-turnout special election at a very improprituous moment for Democrats. Likewise, Warren knocked off Brown last week not just because she was a more feisty candidate than Coakley was, but because she was running in a general election where the state’s natural Democratic dominance would assert itself. This was what I kept hearing from veteran Democrats when I went up to Massachusetts to report on Warren’s midsummer struggles—even if she was having trouble finding her footing as a candidate, they said, one had to assume that she would benefit from high Democratic turnout in a presidential year. Yes, Brown would be able to peel off some of Barack Obama’s voters, but only so many.
And that’s just what happened. When Brown beat Coakley in 2010, 52 to 47 percent, there were barely more than 2.2 million votes cast. When Warren won 54 to 46 percent last week, there were more than 3.1 million votes cast. The contrast is particularly stark in the urban centers where Democrats rack up big margins. In Springfield, some 28,000 people voted in 2010 and Coakley netted about 7,000 votes. Last week, nearly twice as many voted there and Warren netted almost 25,000 votes. In Boston, she netted 120,000 votes where Coakley had netted less than half that amount. Turnout in the city was 65 percent—way above the 43 percent turnout in 2010, and higher even than the 62 percent who turned out for Obama’s first election.
What does this mean for a possible Kerry replacement? Well, on the one hand, that Democrats do need to worry about special elections, when the broader party base is less likely to turn out. But one also needs to keep in mind that the context for this special election (which would likely be held around June) would be much friendlier than the one in January 2010. Unless the tax and “fiscal cliff” negotiations go horribly awry for Obama, he and his party will be in a more favorable spot next spring than they were in late 2009 and early 2010. There is a chance that this time around, Patrick will not decree that his interim appointment to the open seat be forbidden from running in the special election, as he did in 2009 when he appointed longtime Kennedy aide Paul Kirk as interim after the senator’s death. This would allow the interim Democrat to run with a slight sheen of incumbency and, perhaps, even preclude a costly primary. Finally, there is the fact that the state electorate would be coming off a recent election where Warren and other Massachusetts Democrats drilled into the state’s many Democratic-leaning independent voters the importance of putting party over personality—even if voters liked Brown fine, they needed to consider the ramifications of giving Mitch McConnell another vote in the Senate. Presumably, this lesson would maintain a greater hold on voters next spring than it did in early 2010.
These days, the senatorial contest in Massachusetts is getting drowned out by the deafening noise emanating from presidential election news coverage. But in recent weeks, Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren appears to be pulling away from Republican incumbent Scott Brown and now holds a 4.4% lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average.
Boston Globe reporter Michael Levenson checks in on the two candidates’ evolution of styles throughout the course of the campaign cycle:
Fifteen months ago, exploring a run for the Senate, Elizabeth Warren told 60 activists at a Dorchester house party that if she had not succeeded in creating a consumer protection agency, there would have been “blood and teeth on the floor.”
The activists loved it. Here was Warren in full pugilistic mode, the full-throated voice of liberals who had watched dispiritedly as Republicans rose to power on the energy of the Tea Party. At last, they had their counterweight.
Now, as Warren steams into the last two days of her closely fought race with Senator Scott Brown, there is a lot less blood and teeth on the floor and a lot more hugs and hearts on the sleeve. She has softened her image and rhetoric over the campaign, becoming a more polished and, some say, more conventional Democratic candidate.
Brown, a veteran politician who has long branded himself a bipartisan bridge-builder, has undergone his own shifts. He has risked his likability by going on the attack and has pushed his pitch to the left with ads that feature President Obama and tout his support for abortion rights and equal pay for women.
Brown’s moves, designed to tarnish his opponent’s character and align himself with some Democratic ideals, may reflect the political calculation of a Republican trying to win in a heavily Democratic state in a presidential year.
On Saturday, speaking before several hundred supporters at a rally at Plimoth Plantation, Brown made a direct appeal to voters sick of partisan gridlock. He said Warren would march “in lockstep” with her party while he would be “an independent voter, somebody down there working together with both sides.”
In Monday night’s Massachusetts Senatorial debate, Scott Brown noted that his favorite Supreme Court justices are Scalia, Kennedy, Sotomayor and Roberts, which is a little bit like saying that your favorite foods are spam, foie gras, twinkies and vegan butter. While Brown might have been able to pick two out of the above four without raising too many eyebrows, the more names he added to that list, the more it looked like he was randomly grasping at any Justices he could remember. (Especially with Sotomayor and Scalia; for God’s sake, doesn’t Brown know that they are both YANKEES fans??) But what if, despite Elizabeth Warren’s guffaws and obvious glee–which even a facepalm could not hide–Brown actually knows more about The Nine than we’re giving him credit for? The First Casualty has come up with a Venn Diagram to see if we could make any possible sense out of Brown’s answer (click to enlarge):
Bottom line: Brown’s answer would have been way more credible had he stuck with any combination of Scalia // Kennedy // Roberts. As it is, barring some further explanation that we’ve all missed, his four-way answer makes little sense unless he highly prioritizes Catholicism in a Justice. Either that, or he’s a huge fan of the United States v. Jones majority opinion from last term (where the Court held that the Government’s attaching of a GPS device to a car constitutes a search requiring a warrant), which all four model justices joined.
Victoria Kwan holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School in New York and has just completed a clerkship with a judge in Anchorage, Alaska. She tweets as @nerdmeetsboy and will continue to post periodically here on legal issues. Rumor has it she and Jay Pinho are dating.
Tonight incumbent Republican Scott Brown debated Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren once again, and the exchanges were a bit more hostile this time. (David Gregory, as the moderator, was spotty at best.)
What I continue to find interesting about this race is how different the tenor — and how much lower the production values — are in comparison to the national presidential race. Tonight, for example, both candidates really whiffed in key situations: Scott Brown named Antonin Scalia as his model Supreme Court justice (a huge no-no in overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts), Elizabeth Warren clearly knew nothing about the Red Sox when asked (she should be at least marginally prepared for the obvious questions at this point; and no one should underestimate the importance of the hometown team in shaping Mass. elections), and then — perhaps most inexplicably — Brown missed on the same question when he had a clear chance to showcase his blue-collar, sports-aware Mass. roots (cue images of his pickup truck here).
On a side note, I ran across this video of Scott Brown greeting his supporters after the first debate several weeks ago, which aptly demonstrates his aisle-crossing, nice-guy appeal:
Almost all the recent polling updates are looking bad for Mitt Romney. As the election inches ever nearer — only 46 days away now — the debates are looking like the last, best chance for him to pull even with Barack Obama — barring some sort of cataclysmic presidential gaffe or paradigm-shifting world event, although I can’t really imagine many international affairs crises that could pull the polls in Romney’s favor these days.
What this means is that Romney, who’s been preparing for the debates by using Rob Portman as a stand-in for Obama, is under enormous pressure to do some serious damage right from the start of the first presidential debate. And this brings me to yesterday evening’s Massachusetts senatorial debate between the incumbent Republican Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren.
Brown, who recent polls have shown trailing Warren, opened up with a sharp attack on Warren’s professed Native American roots, which were the subject of much controversy earlier this year. The intensity and repetitive nature of Brown’s accusations — especially contrasted to his “nice guy” persona — raise the specter of a campaign running in just-short-of-panic mode: as some noted, his internal polls may be showing a dire situation. Otherwise, his outburst would have been out of step with the tenor usually used in such an apparently close race.
And speaking of that debate — I only watched the first third or so, and was surprised at how ill-prepared and out of breath Brown looked — I couldn’t help but appreciate this pre-debate message from the debate’s moderator, the healthily mustachioed Jon Keller of WBZ Boston:
I will be asking each candidate to respond to the same question, but unless they totally ignore the actual question, I won’t be cross-examining them. That will be up to their opponent.
And it will be up to you to determine how well or poorly each candidate handled the question, how evasive they were or weren’t.
Sometimes when I see the political garbage some voters gladly swallow like it was hearty beef stew, I wonder at their ability to question authority and think for themselves.
But I digress. Going back to Romney, his significant polling deficits — while concerning for him — should serve as a major red flag to Obama’s debate prep team as well. Losing by several percentage points this late in the campaign season means Romney is desperate for a game-changer, and the only events he has significant control over are the debates. A reasonably solid but otherwise unmemorable performance will likely not tip the scales enough to get him to the Promised Land, so he’ll have to come out swinging.
Paradoxically, this leaves Obama in a somewhat vulnerable position. While his mandate in the debates will be to maintain a calm, presidential aura and avoid any costly gaffes, he’ll have to be ready for a virtually infinite number of potential surprises Romney might spring on him. The key for Romney’s camp will be to pick a line of attack that A) catches Obama off-guard and B) comes off as a credible line of attack and not desperate flailing. It’s going to be a fine line, which should make what might otherwise be a relatively boring 90 minutes or two hours of platitudes into something far more interesting.
Nick Hanauer’s taxable income is, he tells me, “tens of millions. In a bad year it can be $10 million.”
His parents made good money in the pillow trade, and after college he set up a few okay businesses. But then one day he met a girl who was dating a guy. She said, “You two are going to be friends.”
The guy had a business idea. Nick loved the sound of it. He invested all the money he had on hand—$45,000 cash. The guy was Jeff Bezos, and the business was Amazon.com.
The “Moneyball” story has practical implications. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don’t be deceived by life’s outcomes. Life’s outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky…
Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.
All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you’ll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don’t.
“You built a factory out there? Good for you,” she says. “But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”
She continues: “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
The 2012 presidential election will be, in part, about how much we as a country ascribe to the importance of luck in our everyday lives. Universal healthcare is, in many ways, a hedge against bad luck. To an extent, all entitlement programs are about mitigating the volatile luck of the draw.
Americans have never really been believers in luck, and that’s part of the reason we became who we are: no excuses, best foot forward, all that jazz. But it’s also given us a massive blind spot, and it’s in times like this that the problem becomes glaringly obvious.
Speculation is heating up that Massachusetts U.S. Senator John Kerry 