JAMES TARANTO: THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS…DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARREN YOU
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-natives-are-restless-1418417040
“A group of more than 300 hundred [sic; it’s 300, not 30,000] former Obama staffers have written an open letter urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president of the United States,” reports the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper. These are former staffers from Barack Obama’s campaigns (and their successor organization, Organizing for Action), not his White House, and the letter calls attention to the ostensible parallels with 2008:
We believed in an unlikely candidate who no one thought had a chance.
We worked for him—and against all odds, we won in Iowa.
We organized like no campaign had organized before—and won the Democratic primary.
We built a movement—and the country elected the first-ever African American president.
We know that the improbable is far from impossible.
Unstated but obvious is one more: We beat the inevitable Hillary Clinton.
Unlike Obama eight years ago, the former junior senator from Massachusetts has thus far disavowed any intention of running for president. But she’s certainly been stirring things up, to the delight of lefties like Salon’s Elias Isquith, author of a piece this morning with the typically overwrought and wordy headline “Elizabeth Warren Goes to War: Why the Democratic Party Could Seriously Change—for Real, This Time.”
The week after the election that cost Democrats their Senate majority, future Minority Leader Harry Reid appointed Warren to the Senate leadership. Her “official title,” TalkingPointsMemo noted at the time, “is Strategic Policy Advisor to the Democratic Policy Communications Committee but her unofficial [designation] is ‘liberal liaison’ and she’s not too crazy about that.”
“I expect her to be Elizabeth Warren,” CNN quoted Reid as saying by way of explaining “what he expects the Massachusetts senator to do as part of the leadership team.” And indeed Warren is being Warren—which is to say she’s emerging as an opponent of the Obama administration on the left. If these were Republicans, the media would call it a “civil war.”
Isquith is especially excited about Warren’s opposition to the nomination of Antonio Weiss as undersecretary of the Treasury for domestic finance. “Weiss is currently an employee of the financial powerhouse Lazard, where he specializes in mergers and acquisitions, and from whom he’s set to receive a $20 million bonus if he takes the government job,” Isquith writes.
“Time after time in government,” Warren complained in a Tuesday speech, “the Wall Street view prevails.” According to Isquith, she “then tied the dynamic to recent Dem-supported policies that, she believes, benefited the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else” (emphasis his):
It’s not the kind of rhetoric you’d expect to hear from a newbie senator with presidential aspirations, especially one who’d just been brought into the party’s inner circle—and especially one who’d already received tut-tuts from the Dems’ formidable neoliberal wing. . . .
For those hoping that Warren would respond to her ascension into the Dems’ Senate leadership by keeping her criticisms within the family, as it were, the speech was a bad sign. But for those who want to one day see Sen. Elizabeth Warren running the party’s economic policy, it’s a very good one indeed.
And she’s had a busy week. By Wednesday, as the Federalist’s Sean Davis notes, she was attempting to engineer a government shutdown over a tweak to the Dodd-Frank bank-bailout law that is included in a spending bill dysphoniously nicknamed “cromnibus.” (For a discussion of the provision’s merits, see today’s Wall Street Journal editorial.)
Davis has some fun quoting Warren from last year, when she characterized Republican lawmakers then threatening a shutdown as “the anarchy gang” and accused them of favoring “lead in children’s toys,” meat “crawling with deadly bacteria” and morning-sickness drugs that “cause horrible deformities in little babies.” It’s the latest example of Michael Barone’s observation that all procedural arguments are insincere.
Warren’s allies in the House—including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—failed her, as the spending bill passed last night, 219-206. Both parties were split, with 57 Democratic ayes compensating for 67 Republican nays. As the Daily Beast noted in a headline, Pelosi and Michele Bachmann were united in opposition; Speaker John Boehner and the president in support.
The vote occasioned some bitterness on the right, as the Hill reports:
Rep. Marlin Stutzman is claiming he was duped by his own GOP leaders.
The Indiana Republican said he voted Thursday on a rule advancing the $1.1 trillion government funding bill after leadership told him they planned to yank the massive measure and replace it with a more palatable short-term funding bill.
Stutzman’s vote proved crucial to the 1,600-page bill’s final passage late Thursday night, given that the procedural rule vote passed 214-212, just a one-vote margin.
If Stutzman and outgoing Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.) had not switched their vote on the rule to “yes,” the entire package, known as the “cromnibus,” would have been defeated.
Not surprisingly, Stutzman voted against final passage.
Tensions between conservative lawmakers and the Republican congressional leadership are by now an old story. A revolt of Capitol Hill liberals against Obama is something new.
“We don’t like lobbying that is being done by the president or anybody else [for] a bill that . . . would give a big gift to Wall Street and the bankers,” the Hill quotes Rep. Maxine Waters of California as saying before the vote. “If the president is lobbying, we do not like it, and we’re saying to our members, ‘Don’t be intimidated by anybody.’ ”
Politico reports that “the White House’s aggressive push to salvage” the bill “left liberal lawmakers feeling burned” by the president “and raised significant doubts about their desire to cooperate heading into next year’s Republican takeover of Congress”:
Obama’s base said he tried to sell them out—and didn’t even wait to do it until Republicans officially expand their majority in the House and take over the Senate come January. . . .
“I’m enormously disappointed the White House feels the only way they could get a bill is to go along with this,” Pelosi said Thursday afternoon, coming to the floor to declare that she wouldn’t be voting for the bill so long as it includes the Dodd-Frank rollback “blackmail.” . . .
“If I go home and say ‘well, I had to vote to give new special favors to billionaires and the big Wall Street banks who destroyed the economy and my district’s still hurting, because otherwise, we would’ve had a 90-day CR.’ You know what they’re gonna say? ‘What the hell is a 90-day CR?’ ” said Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.).
Democrats who voted “aye” could probably come up with a more artful explanation than DeFazio’s, but “What the hell is a 90-day CR?” is not a bad question.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest defended the spending bill, which includes what Politico calls “several Democratic priorities.” Said Earnest: “This is the kind of compromise the president’s been seeking from Republicans for years now.”
The Warren Democrats aren’t in a compromising mood, and one can see why. Obama is a lame duck, there’s no longer a Senate majority to defend, and the Senate Democratic caucus will be considerably more liberal next month. Those who would like to see Warren “running the party’s economic policy,” as Isquith puts it, have little reason to refrain from focusing on that goal.
Reuters reports the kerfuffle appears likely to end with a whimper by Saturday night’s deadline:
Reid said he hoped the bill would pass on Friday to spare Americans the drama of yet another budget crisis. While there could be some opposition to the measure from both the left flank of the Democrats and some Republicans, it appeared it would garner the 60 votes needed in the 100-seat Senate to overcome any procedural blocks.
In addition to the Dodd-Frank fix, the liberals object to a provision in the bill that would triple the legal limit on individual contributions on political parties. Salon’s Jim Newell speculates that “the Democratic Party might just be fine with that”—after all, both parties stand to benefit from bigger contributions.
But the Democratic left is ideologically committed to federal restrictions on campaign finance and speech. That commitment may be contrary to interest. The Washington Post reports there are “signs” that Mrs. Clinton “will postpone making her shadow campaign official until later in 2015 than expected”:
[Mrs.] Clinton is also debating whether to establish an exploratory committee—a placeholder organization that would allow her to raise money to pay for consultants, office space and other operating expenses. But the move would trigger financial disclosures she can now avoid, and Clinton is getting a lot of advice against forming such a committee, two Democratic strategists said.
An exploratory committee might also appear too coy for a previous candidate with obvious ambitions for a second try, according to several Democratic advisers, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because Clinton has not yet said she is running.
“At this point, what would she be exploring?” one strategist with ties to Clinton said.
It’s often observed that campaign-finance restrictions almost inevitably benefit incumbents, and although Mrs. Clinton does not currently hold office, her high profile and expectation of inevitability put her in a position analogous to that of an incumbent. The ability to avoid regulation through delay gives her an added advantage over prospective challengers, including Elizabeth Warren.
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