Elizabeth Warren wants to fight Republicans and help people. Democrats need to join her
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Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a message for her fellow Democrats ahead of the 2022 midterm elections: DO STUFF! “We’ve got nearly 200 days. If we don’t deliver, if we don’t get up off our rear ends and make it happen, we’re in real trouble,” she said in a Tuesday interview with Politico. “But if we do deliver, if we can get some tangible results that touch people’s lives, then we can go to the polls in November with our heads held high.”
She also wrote about it in The New York Times last week: “Democrats win elections when we show we understand the painful economic realities facing American families and convince voters we will deliver meaningful change. To put it bluntly: if we fail to use the months remaining before the elections to deliver on more of our agenda, Democrats are headed toward big losses in the midterms.”
Where she wants Democrats to deliver: an anti-price gouging bill, banning insider trading for Congress, lowering drug prices, taxing the rich, expanding overtime pay eligibility, and canceling student debt. These are promises made in the 2020 campaign that she says need to be delivered on, and soon.
Put a bill on the floor giving the Federal Trade Commission authority to investigate price gouging, she argues in the Politico interview, and “dare the Republicans to vote against it. A clean, simple bill.” Republicans keep yammering on about inflation, so here’s their chance, she says. “Let’s put it to the Republicans. Do they care about price gouging from the perspective of helping the consumers? Or from the perspective of letting the big corporations continue to get away with it?”
Voters, she writes at the NYT, have long identified corruption in government as a top concern, so Congress should act by starting at home. “[M]embers of Congress and their spouses shouldn’t be allowed to own or trade individual stocks.” She has bipartisan legislation with Montana Sen. Steve Daines to enforce just that, because “to tackle the urgent challenges we face—climate change, income inequality, systemic injustice—we must root out corruption.”
What else Congress can do, she says, is make billionaires pay more in taxes. “About two-thirds of likely American voters—including a majority of Republicans—say it’s time for billionaires to pay more in taxes,” she writes. “Nearly three-quarters of Americans want to put an end to wildly profitable corporations paying nothing or little in federal income taxes (yes, Amazon, I’m looking at you) and put into place a global minimum corporate tax.”
That can be done with just Democratic votes in the budget reconciliation bill that Democrats have available to use right now, and even Joe Manchin (WV) is theoretically in support of that (Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema could still be a problem).
As far as Manchin and the Build Back Better package he’s been fighting is concerned, she told Politico, “I don’t care about the titles, labels, I don’t care about who gets to carry the leadership mantle or the authorship for doing the pieces. We need to pick the pieces that the American people are counting on us to deliver on.”
That’s the Congress side of the equation. She also wants President Joe Biden to act. She outlined how the administration can cut prescription drug prices with executive action in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra this week. She urged Becerra to “move swiftly to use your existing authorities to give sorely needed relief to the millions of Americans paying far too much for their prescription drugs.”
Biden can also, she argues, act decisively “on everything from lowering prescription drug prices to ensuring that more workers are eligible for overtime pay can be executed by the president alone, using the authority already given to him by existing laws, without rounding up 50 Senate votes.”
Senate Republicans are already trying to flex their muscle with legislation trying to ban Biden from canceling student debt, Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson writes. There’s another issue where Democrats should dare Republicans to oppose them, Warren argues, again pointing to polling that shows how popular debt cancellation is with the voters that Democrats need to have turn out this November—women and Black and brown people. “With the stroke of a pen, the president could make massive strides to close gender and racial wealth gaps,” she writes.
Given the new polling from Daily Kos/Civiqs, Biden should heed her call. “The survey found that 67% of Democratic voters aged 18-34 believe Biden ‘made a lot of promises during his campaign that he hasn’t delivered on,’” Daily Kos’ Kerry Eleveld writes. That’s reinforced by a new Harvard Youth Poll which shows an 18-point loss in approval for Biden in the past year among 18-29 year olds; 85% of the respondents in that poll said they favor student debt relief.
“The urgency of the moment” demands that Democrats answer, Warren told Politico. “The things we need to do are things that touch people’s lives directly,” Warren said. “We promised to act on this. The Republicans did not.”
Force the votes, take the executive actions, and make Republicans—and Manchin and Sinema, if necessary—fight against the things that people want. The things that people need. What better argument to increase the Democratic majority in the Senate than making those two irrelevant.
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