Last night Elizabeth Warren participated in a CNN town hall, along with other presidential hopefuls Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris. While each had their moments, both the studio audience and social media watchers raved about Warren’s performance and here’s why — from impeachment discussions to explaining why she wants to break up big tech, Warren gave a masterclass in every topic she touched.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Warren why she is recommending the House being impeachment proceedings and she explained that not only is this about the principles of our nation, she said, ‘In a dictatorship, everything in government revolves around protecting the person at the center, but not under our democracy.’
She went onto explain that the Mueller Report not only lays precisely when and how Donald Trump broke the law, but even included the footnotes for each citation. Warren explained that this isn’t as much about Donald Trump as it is about the rule of law and future presidents.
She started off responding to the idea that “this is not the time” for impeachment because it will take away focus.
Listen as she says every member of Congress should have to hear the facts of the Mueller investigation during impeachment proceedings and then have their vote publicly recorded. Are they okay with abandoning the rule of law or not? Each member took an oath to uphold the Constitution and Warren says they have a Constitutional duty to move forward with impeachment. If they don’t hold Donald Trump accountable, how far outside the law will a future president be allowed to go?
Asked by an audience member if she was getting “Hillary-ed” in this election, what she learned fro the 2016 election and how she is overcoming sexism, Warren talked about running for the Senate in 2011 and how she wasn’t just running for herself, she was running for women and girls everywhere. Read the full, thoughtful exchange below.
On climate change and the urgency of a Green New Deal:
Day after day, Elizabeth Warren has been laying out one major progressive policy proposal after another and yesterday was no exception. Before the town hall, she unveiled a student loan debt forgiveness plan that would help an astonishing 42 million Americans. More on that plan:
Elizabeth Warren is getting it done. She’s persisting.
Here’s the full exchange on the sexism question (transcript via Vox):
Ellie Taylor, Wisconsin: Hi, Senator. This isn’t as much of a policy-based question. Some people have voiced you getting ‘Hillary-ed’ in the election. So what lessons have you learned from 2016 that will help you to kind of navigate these situations when you might be criticized for something that’s partially motivated by sexist?
Warren: That’s a really good question, but if I can, I want to go back before 2016. Can we all just let our hair down here for a minute? This didn’t just start in 2016. Been around for a while.
I’ll tell you when I ran into it big time. I never thought I was going to be in elected politics. I’ve known what I wanted to do all my life. I wanted to be a teacher. I thought that would be my job forever. During the crash I end up down in Washington setting up a consumer agency for President Obama. After I did that for a year, the Republicans said, we’re never going to let her stay and run that thing. I came back to Massachusetts. There was a very popular Republican incumbent. He had high approval ratings, he had a bucket of money in the bank from Wall Street and he had just beaten a woman who was really good and everybody thought was going to win. So I start getting these phone calls from people and they say, Elizabeth, you should run against him for the Senate seat. You should do it. Go ahead. You should do this thing. You’re going to lose, but you should definitely do — these were Democrats calling me. Saying, you should do this. You’re going to lose. All I can say is Democrats, get a better message.
But people said to me, you’re going to lose because Massachusetts in 2011, according to conventional wisdom, was not ready to have a woman senator or governor. We never had. And people said it’s just not going to happen, not at least for another generation.
Now, you can imagine how I heard that. I heard that as, get in this race, right now, which is what I did. So I jumped in the race and sure enough, you know, the early coverage is about what I’m wearing. It’s about my hair. It’s about my voice. It’s about whether or not I smile enough. I didn’t. It was every part of that. This kept up and I thought, you know, look, I’m going to be in this race. I’m going to make something count every single day. So every day when I saw a little girl, I would come up and I’d usually get down, I’m a teacher, and I would say, ‘Hi, my name is Elizabeth and I’m running for Senate because that’s what girls do.’ And then we would pinky swear to remember.
And so every night when I went home, no matter what the day had been like, I would count up how many pinky swears we had done during the day. And I kept getting out there and hammering my message. I kept getting out there talking about what’s happening with working families across the country, talking about how Washington works great for the rich and the powerful, just not working for anyone else, and how we’ve got to fight back against that. So I talked about it every single day and ultimately I went from 17 points behind that guy to beating him by 7.5.
So the way I see it is here we are in a presidential, and it’s the same kind of you stay after it every day.
One might say you persist.