Elizabeth Warren would have made a great president. Who knows, she still might get the chance, given her relative youth in what appears to be a golden age for presidents in their golden years. We can dream.
When she suspended her campaign on Thursday, it ended the possibility that the Democratic Party would nominate, for the second time, a woman for president. It would have been a special kind of justice for The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote to move out of the White House after being defeated by a woman. Having that as the final day of his presidency would have been a perfect bookend to the incredibly powerful Women’s March that took place on his first, a true vindication of what Gloria Cole, a Boston marcher, offered as a reason that she took to the streets: namely, to proclaim, “We’re here, and we’re not going away.” As our own Sher Spooner put it, the departure of the final woman from the 2020 presidential race was like “a final punch in the gut to women everywhere.”
I’m not a woman, but I’ve been with Warren since she announced, and I stand by what I wrote in January 2019: “I’m with her because of what she believes, what she has accomplished, and what I know she can do to make America a stronger, fairer, and more just society for every one of us.”
Sen. Warren’s candidacy attracted me because she excels at diagnosing problems, developing concrete solutions (“She’s got a plan for that!”), and connecting the matter to deeply held American values of fairness, equal opportunity, and redressing imbalances of power. The Democratic nominee, whether it’s former Vice President Joe Biden or Sen. Bernie Sanders, absolutely must echo and center Warren’s approach and accomplishments as evidence of what a Democratic administration can do for the American people.
Solving problems is what brought Warren into politics in the first place. She started out as a teacher, then went to law school and, through her research, became an expert on bankruptcy and consumer issues. Learning about what real people were going through precipitated her shift leftward, as she came to see the need for an active government that could protect individual consumers—not to mention honest businesses trying to compete fairly—from companies all too willing to break the rules in order to pad their profits.
Whereas conservatives rigidly adhere to an ideological approach on the role of government, progressives are pragmatists who examine data and take an empirical approach. In other words, we look at what’s wrong and figure out what will work to fix it. In that sense, Elizabeth Warren personifies the best of progressive, Democratic politics.
In studying why so many Americans were declaring bankruptcy, Warren saw that the existing economic system was causing real harm for large numbers of people. In addition to writing about it in academic law journals—as valuable a contribution as that is—she wanted to do something about it in the realm of policy. She wanted to bring, in her words, “big, structural change” to the system—and how can you not love that as a chant at a campaign rally? In a recent USA Today op-ed, the senator reviewed the actions she took.
In 2007, I came up with the idea for the [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or] CFPB — a new federal agency dedicated to protecting families from predatory financial products and holding financial firms accountable for cheating consumers. I had spent years studying how Wall Street banks and other financial predators were loading up mortgages, credit card contracts, and other financial documents with tricks and traps designed to cheat families. Those predatory mortgages set the stage for the financial crisis and recession that followed, costing millions of Americans their homes, their jobs, and their savings.
Federal regulators had most of the tools they needed to stop this predatory behavior but they didn’t use them. They often did the opposite — actively opposing attempts by states to protect consumers from these practices. Why did they fail? Simple. They were captured by the banking industry they were supposed to regulate. I wasn’t in politics after the 2008 crisis hit, but when Congress got involved to reform the financial sector, I saw my chance to end this corrupt, captured regulatory system, and I pushed hard to make the CFPB a reality.
Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman offered high praise for Warren’s efforts at the time she announced her White House run.
The CFPB wasn’t just a great Warren plan. It came to a reality that, for years, has made a real difference in people’s lives. The bureau has managed to claw back $12 billion for American consumers who were done dirty by financial services companies. Mortgages and debt collection are the two areas in which the most consumer complaints have arisen, each representing about one quarter of the total.
Dennis Kelleher, CEO of Better Markets, which describes itself as “a non-profit, non-partisan, and independent organization founded in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to promote the public interest in the financial markets,” explained in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that the CFPB’s work goes beyond protecting individual consumers—as vital as that work is.
Protection of individual consumers isn’t the only reason Americans should care about a strong, independent CFPB. Writ large, predatory conduct sows instability throughout the financial system, leading to crashes and bailouts. This is what happened in the years before the 2008 financial crisis. Financial predators ripped off unsuspecting and unprotected mortgage consumers, and the consumers became victims of egregious fraud. The various federal regulators did nothing. Some even stopped state regulators from enforcing their state’s consumer protection laws.
The result was rampant predatory lending, the collapse of underwriting standards and the packaging, sale and distribution of fraudulent derivatives and products, all of which inflated the subprime bubble, causing the entire financial system to crash and almost leading to a second Great Depression. The chance of this happening again — in a new and different form, undoubtedly — is virtually assured as the Trump administration appears committed to crippling the CFPB and leaving consumers unprotected once again.
One might think that every American could get behind such an effort. In a word: nope. Warren lamented that the bureau had been opposed at just about every step by the very financial industry it is charged with policing. “The CFPB’s only client is the American people, and this has driven Wall Street crazy,” she writes in USA Today. Additionally, there’s the Republican Party, which fought the CFPB’s creation and, since Donald Trump took office, has had real success in neutering it.
Sen. Warren proclaimed that the CFPB shows “just what government can accomplish when it is freed from the corruption of corporate influence. … That’s why Wall Street and its Republican allies are so determined to destroy it.” That’s a compelling story, and any Democratic candidate who supports the CFPB—and all of them should—can adapt its values to their own campaign.
Warren was writing in response to Seila Law v. CFPB, a case that the U.S. Supreme Court heard on Tuesday, in which the plaintiff asked the justices to declare the entire bureau unconstitutional. Seila Law brought the suit because the bureau was investigating the firm’s shady practices—some allegedly “unlawful acts or practices in the advertising, marketing, or sale of debt relief services.” In order to drum up more business, the law firm was apparently lying about what it could do for people who had big debts and were desperate for help. The CFPB issued a civil investigation demand in order to get information from the firm as part of its investigation. The suit is a last-ditch effort to short-circuit it by shutting down the investigators.
Even if the court doesn’t go as far as pulling the plug on the CFPB, it does seem likely that the five conservative justices will issue a ruling that undermines its independence—something that absolutely suits the Orange Julius Caesar and his billionaire buddies. Warren closed her op-ed by warning that if SCOTUS sides with the big banks over consumers, American voters will remember it in November.
Speaking of November, Republicans have for years been waging a War on Consumers, and Democratic candidates for president and Congress need to call them out on it—specifically by talking about Warren’s CFPB. Of the two frontrunners, Joe Biden has already stated that he's a longtime supporter of Warren's work in creating the agency. Seriously, though: The CFPB is wildly popular, even among Republican voters.
The Republicans certainly have not let up in their War on Consumers. Just look at what’s happened in recent days. The House Financial Services Committee recently concluded an investigation into some shady dealings between Eric Blankenstein, a high-level Trump appointee at the CFPB, and Wells Fargo. That company committed truly shocking broadscale fraud. What it did sounds so crazy that I didn’t even believe it myself when I first read NPR’s reporting on it back in 2017.
Wells Fargo is back in the spotlight for another scandal. This time, for signing up 490,000 auto-loan customers for insurance they didn't need.
This comes less than a year after the bank generated a massive public outcry for opening millions of unwanted accounts for customers.
Customers who already had car insurance say they had no idea they were being charged for this insurance from Wells Fargo. And the bank acknowledges that tens of thousands of people wound up in default, which affected people's credit scores, and thousands had their cars repossessed.
Somehow, Wells Fargo struck a deal and got a settlement with Trump’s CFPB, one so soft and squishy in terms of actually forcing the company to provide restitution to those it wronged that in 2018, our own Walter Einenkel rightly described it as “the most base form of corruption.”
As The New York Times reported Wednesday, the House committee’s report makes clear just how much corruption there remains, even after the aforementioned settlement was completed:
According to the report, [previous Wells Fargo CEO] C. Allen Parker, explicitly told a member of the bank’s board in May that Mr. Blankenstein had promised him that the Trump administration would continue to smooth the way for the bank — even after Mr. Blankenstein resigned that week over racist statements he had made as a law student.
Eric also assured me that there would continue to be ‘political’ oversight of the engagement with us, although he wasn’t yet sure who his successor would be,” Mr. Parker wrote to the board member, James Quigley.
[...]
Given their conversations with Mr. Blankenstein, the bank’s leaders were expecting to be able to resolve the active investigations with the agency in private, without paying any more fines. They expressed surprise, according to the report, when members of the agency’s staff said two months later that they were not aware of Mr. Blankenstein’s assurances.
Under Trump the CFPB has also severely weakened consumer protections relating to payday loans, and has let company after company get away with scamming consumers. The agency is a shell of what it was supposed to be—of what Sen. Warren imagined it could be.
Warren created the CFPB to give American consumers an ally in the fight against financial services companies that are, ostensibly, meant to serve them. In reality, too many of the banks, mortgage brokers, payday lenders, and credit card companies see their customers not as people they serve, but as suckers they can take advantage of. This is especially true for lower-income folks, the elderly, and the Americans of color who continue to face discriminatory treatment by the financial industry.
In addition to members of those groups, millions of others either have experienced their own horror story about being confused, misled, mistreated, or just plain ripped-off by one of these companies, or have a close friend or relative who has. Altogether, that's quite a lot of people who could be moved by a message that shows that Donald Trump is on the side of the financial industry cheaters, while Democrats are on the side of consumers. That contrast is a winning message. It’s Elizabeth Warren’s message.
One might be tempted to focus on what could have been when thinking about Warren’s White House run. Yet there’s plenty to be proud of. Although she won only a small number of delegates, she had a significant impact on the race, as detailed Perry Bacon at FiveThirtyEight:
Her strategy of rolling out a ton of left-leaning policy plans arguably forced Sanders to match her, and she pushed the other candidates leftward even if they didn’t wind up quite where Warren was. Her plans also created public conversations about ideas that had not previously been in the mainstream, such as the idea that Facebook should be broken up. And I expect future Democratic candidates for president and other offices will tout ideas similar to the wealth tax that she proposed.
In other words, no matter whether the nomination goes to Sanders or Biden, many of Warren’s ideas may end up “winning,” even if she couldn’t.
2020 won't bring us our first woman president, or our second president of color. Given the historic diversity of the initial Democratic field, that leaves many of us feeling a profound sense of disappointment, to say the very least. That pain is compounded by what happened less than four years ago, when a highly qualified woman got three million more votes than her opponent, only to watch him be inaugurated. And not just any him, but one whose own recorded words—not to mention the at least two dozen accusations of sexual assault and misconduct women have leveled against him—reveal a degree of sexism that should sicken any one of us.
As we acknowledge and respect that pain, one hopes that there's comfort to be had in the fact that 2020 might bring us our first Jewish president or second Catholic one. In a climate where white Protestant evangelicals insist that they're the true Americans, and, in the case of Sanders, considering the rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes, neither is insignificant. Yet no such progress will occur if Trump gets another four years.
In the upcoming election, the fight over the CFPB and the reasons for its creation serve as a perfect distillation of what the Democratic Party should stand for, in terms of both policy and, as important, values.
Both to honor Sen. Warren’s contributions and because doing so will help defeat Trump and make it possible to achieve her goals, the Democratic nominee must put her fight on behalf of consumers—and more broadly on behalf of the economically vulnerable who make up a majority of the American people—at the heart of the Democratic message to voters.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)