Elizabeth Warren is currently the senior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. She is running for the Democratic party nomination for the 2020 presidential election. Prior to being elected to the Senate, Warren was a law professor and authored several books. She was born and raised in Oklahoma and later moved to Massachusetts to teach law at Harvard University.
While serving in the U.S. Senate, Warren has supported policies such as Medicare for All, regulating big banks, a federal jobs guarantee, and the Green New Deal.
Personal Life
On June 22, 1949, Elizabeth Warren (née Herring) was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In 1965, she graduated high school at age 16 with a full scholarship to The George Washington University. She later dropped out and enrolled at the University of Houston.
In 1968, she married Jim Warren. The couple had two children, Amelia and Alex. The couple later divorced in 1978.
In 1970, she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Houston. In 1976, she obtained her JD from Rutgers University School of Law. Upon graduation, Warren worked as a lecturer at Rutgers University School of Law. In 1978, she started working for the University of Houston as a professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.
Warren married Bruce Mann in 1980 and the couple is still married to this day.
From 1981 to 1987, Warren worked as a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. During her tenure at the University of Texas, she also served as a Research Associate at the university and was a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. From 1987 to 1995, she served as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
In 1996, Warren switched her political affiliation from Republican to Democrat.
From 1995 until 2012, Warren was a professor at Harvard Law School. In 2000, she was named American Law Institute’s Vice President.
In 2004, she published The Two-Income Trap which she co-authored with her daughter, Amelia. The book “exposes the financial meltdown of today’s middle-class families.” The book caught the attention of television show host, Dr. Phil, and Warren and her daughter appeared on the show to share financial advice with guests.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Warren served as Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. She served in that role until 2010.
From 2010 until 2011, Warren served as a Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Assistant to the President of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In 2012, Warren was elected to the U.S. Senate, defeating incumbent Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown 54% to 46%.
In 2014, she published A Fighting Chance, a memoir that details her life and career. In 2017, Warren published another book titled, This Fight Is Our Fight, detailing her vision for enhancing the American middle class.
Warren won re-election to the U.S. Senate in 2018 beating Republican challenger Geoff Diehl 60% to 32%. She announced her presidential run on New Year’s Eve 2018.
Warren resides in a $2.4 million mansion in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann, hold between $4 million and about $11 million in investment funds and retirement accounts. Warren also received a $300,000 advance for her book, This Fight Is Our Fight.
In April 2019, Warren released her 2018 tax returns. Together the couple made a combined income of $905,742. Her husband earned $402,897 as a Harvard professor and Warren earned, $176,280 from her salary as a Senator, and $324,687 in income related to her book sales.
Political & Professional Background
Warren spent most of her career as a legal professor, but she also worked for many clients as a corporate attorney. Warren has never disclosed a full list of her clients.
In the 1990s, Warren helped write a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court for LTV Steel that argued the company did not have to pay into its retirees’ health care fund. Warren is listed on the petition to the U.S. Supreme Court urging review of the case, which the court rejected.Warren made $10,000 for writing the petition and claimed that retirees’ benefits were not in jeopardy even if LTV had won the legal battle. Opponents of Warren’s position included the Clinton Administration, which argued that companies like LTV Steel were “trying to take advantage of the bankruptcy laws to avoid their responsibility.”
From May 2008 to September 2010, Warren worked for the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, LLP, where she was hired to consult on the case Travelers Indemnity Company v. Pearlie Bailey, Et. Al. Her work for Travelers Insurance was to help the company gain immunity from asbestos lawsuits. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling was described as “disastrous for asbestos victims.” According to a Boston Herald report, an attorney who represented thousands of asbestos victims said Travelers “tried to get out on the cheap instead of answering for what they did in front of regular people on a jury, they want a bankruptcy court to bail them out.”
Warren defended her work for Travelers Insurance claiming she had no way of knowing that Travelers would seek to avoid paying victims from the settlement after she left the case. She also once claimed she was working for asbestos victims.
A 2002 affidavit showed that Warren consulted for Dow Chemical “in the early days of the Dow Corning bankruptcy.”According to a Boston Globe report, “In that period, the company set up a trust to pay plaintiffs who claimed in lawsuits that silicone breast implants had led to health problems.” In the settlement, Dow agreed to pay women $2,000 to $330,000 each.
In July 2010, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act became law which created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The goal of the CFPB is “watching out for American consumers in the market for consumer financial products and services.” Warren has often been credited with coming up with the concept of the CFPB.
In September 2010, President Obama appointed Warren “as his choice to head the steering committee of the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”While leading the new government organization, Warren’s “first hirings were five people with Wall Street or financial services experience.” She cited these individuals’ “expertise.” She hired a former lobbyist for Freddie Mac, a former Deutsche Bank managing director and Capital One
Financial senior vice president, and a managing director at Morgan Stanley.
Warren was passed over to lead the CFPB but served as a Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the CFPB and Assistant to the President of the Treasury on the CFPB.
Warren has often cited her Native American heritage throughout her career. She has said that her family told her about her Cherokee and Delaware ancestry. Warren stated that “this is what my brothers and I were told by my mom and my dad, my mamaw and my pappaw. This is our lives. And I’m very proud of it.”
In April 2012, the Boston Herald reported that despite claiming she never used her Native American heritage when applying for a job, Warren had listed herself as a minority professor in faculty directories for nine years, from 1986 until 1995.
Although she previously failed to produce any evidence of her Native American ancestors, in October of 2018, Warren released a six-page DNA report that showed her heritage as anywhere between 1/64th and 1/1024th Native American. The move came with criticism from the press as well as from Native American activists and the Cherokee Nation tribe calling it “inappropriate and wrong.”
In February 2019, The Washington Post obtained Warren’s 1986 registration card for the State Bar of Texas where she claimed to be Native American. According to the report, “it is the first document to surface showing Warren making the claim in her own handwriting. Her office didn’t dispute its authenticity.”
On the Issues
Health Care
In March 2018, Warren introduced The Consumer Health Protection Act to increase the affordability and reliability of ObamaCare marketplace insurance plans.
Warren is a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All legislation. However, during a March 2019 CNNtown hall, Warren claimed to be open to multiple pathways to universal coverage. “When we talk about Medicare for All, there are a lot of different pathways,” Warren said. “What we’re all looking for is the lowest cost way to make sure that everybody gets covered.” She claims such a goal would be possible by first lowering the Medicare age to 60, 55, or 50. She said that “helps cover people who are most at risk,” but suggested the possibility of starting with younger Americans. “Some people say do it the other way. Let’s bring it up from — everybody under 30 gets covered by Medicare,” Warren said.
Universal Child Care
In February 2019, Warren introduced a universal child care proposal.The bill would “create a network of government-funded care centers based partly on the existing Head Start network, with employees paid comparably to public-school teachers.”
According to her campaign, “the plan would be funded by Warren’s proposed wealth tax on households with more than $50 million in assets.” Economists estimate that the plan would cost the federal government $70 billion more per year than it currently spends on child care programs.
In an essay written on Medium, Warren said: “My plan will guarantee high-quality child care and early education for every child in America from birth to school age. It will be free for millions of American families, and affordable for everyone. This is the kind of big, structural change we need to produce an economy that works for everyone.”
She characterizes her plan as a “win-win-win,” claiming it’s good for parents, kids, and the economy.
Guaranteed Jobs
Warren supported and co-sponsors fellow 2020 presidential contender Cory Booker’s 2018 Guaranteed Jobs bill. This bill would create three-year pilot job guarantees in 15 communities where there are high rates of unemployment.
Although Warren has remained relatively silent on this issue, she has maintained a focused message addressing the socio-economic inequalities that such a guarantee is aimed to impact.
Free College
Warren is in favor of free college tuition and is a co-sponsor of Bernie Sanders’s 2017 Tuition-Free College bill. At a press conference on the legislation, Warren said, “we are here to fight for our values. We are here to fight for opportunities for people to get an education without getting crushed by student loan debt.” In a July 2018 speech, Warren characterized the need for free college as being “a time of crisis.” Her backing of free college is coupled with her ardent support for teachers unions and her dissatisfaction with the impact of student loan debt on U.S. citizens and the labor market.
Warren has also backed a proposal by Senator Brian Schatz that would let students attend public colleges without having to take on any loans to pay for tuition, room and board, books, or other expenses.
Climate Change
Warren is a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal. Although some estimates have the policy costing $93 trillion, Warren has continued her push for substantial climate change legislation.
In an interview with National Public Radio, Warren was asked about her stance on climate change and the Green New Deal. Warren said: “We have to rebuild our infrastructure to deal with climate change that is bearing down upon us. The urgency of the moment on climate change cannot be overstated. It’s upon us and we need to make change and make change fast. And that means in part rebuilding our power grids, our entire infrastructure system. We need to harden against the coming storms. Underpasses and overpasses and bridges. We need a 21st-century infrastructure that accounts for coming changes in climate, and we need it fast.”
Gun Control
In 2013, Warren co-sponsored legislation that would effectively ban assault, “Rambo-style” weapons.
During a floor speech on the legislation, Warren said, “we can ban Rambo-style assault weapons. We can take these weapons of war off our streets…If someone cannot get on an airplane because the FBI is concerned they might be plotting to do harm against Americans, then they shouldn’t be able to walk into a store and buy a Rambo-style assault weapon. If someone cannot get on an airplane because the FBI is concerned they might be plotting to do harm against Americans, then they shouldn’t be able to walk into a store and buy a Rambo-style assault weapon. If we fail to act the next time someone uses a gun to kill one of us, a gun that we could have kept out of the hands of a terrorist, then the members of this Congress will have blood on our hands.”
Warren penned letters to nine gun company shareholders urging them to use their positions to demand change in the arms industry. She wrote, “your company is in a powerful position. You have reaped significant benefits from your investment in gun manufacturers, but have done little to reduce the violence and murders caused by their products…I encourage you [to] take action to ensure that the gun companies in which you invest are taking steps to reduce gun violence.”
Warren sent the letters to the heads of BlackRock, Invesco Advisers Inc., Vanguard Group, LSV Asset Management, Dimensional Fund Advisers Inc., Voya Investment Management Co., the London Co. of Virginia, Fidelity Investments and First Eagle Investment Management Co. She also joined other senators in writing a letter to the National Institute of Health to renew gun research grants that funded CDC’s gun violence research initiatives.
Warren has since called for “sensible changes” to gun laws, adding that our elected officials cannot be “held hostage by the NRA” any longer.
“It is our responsibility here in the United States Congress to make sensible changes on behalf of the American people…There are a lot of different steps we could take,” she contended. “We could do more extensive background checks. We could make the weapons themselves safer and less likely to be capable of shooting many people in a short period of time.”
Big Tech
In March 2019, Warren announced as part of her presidential campaign that she wants to break up big tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook citing that they are monopolizing the industry. She told The New York Times that she “want[s] a government that makes sure everybody – even the biggest and most powerful companies in America -plays by the rules.”
According to Business Insider, her plan “includes a call for ‘platform neutrality’ -banning tech giants from both providing a marketplace and selling their product on the same marketplace — and the appointment of new regulators that would undo mergers between massive tech companies. She argues that these mergers smother competition and undermine democracy.”
Immigration
Warren has been a vocal critic of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and has called for its replacement with something that both works and reflects our values. At an immigration protest, Warren said, “the President’s deeply immoral actions have made it obvious — we need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom, starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our morality and that works.”
Warren continued by saying, “President Trump seems to think the only way to have immigration rules is rip parents from their families, is to treat rape victims and refugees like terrorists and to put children in cages.”
Warren also supports the Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and was a co-sponsor of the 2018 HELP Separated Children Act.
Must Reads
Washington Post: Elizabeth Warren Apologizes for Calling Herself a Native American
Buzzfeed: Elizabeth Warren Said She Wants To Cut Open Republicans’ Bodies To See If They Have Hearts
Free Beacon: Elizabeth Warren’s Female Staffers Made 71% of Male Staffers’ Salaries in 2016
Free Beacon: Elizabeth Warren Attends Martha’s Vineyard Dinner Hosted by Big Bank Executive
Washington Examiner: Sen. Elizabeth Warren joins nationwide immigration protests, calls for ‘replacing’ ICE
Washington Free Beacon: Warren, Gillibrand Speak at Rally Hosted By Anti-Israel Activists
CNN: Warren warns wealthy potential competitors with call for no self-funding
Washington Post: Sen. Warren says she doesn’t ‘take PAC money of any kind.’ What does that mean?
Politico: ‘Liz Was a Diehard Conservative’