The Senate wound up with 11 freshmen after the 2012 elections, 6 graduates from the House 4 from state government and one-- Elizabeth Warren-- direct from outside the grubby, hidebound realm of electoral politics:
• Jeff Flake (R-AZ)• Chris Murphy (D-CT)• Mazie Hirono (D-HI)• Joe Donnelly (D-IN)• Angus King (I-ME)• Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)• Deb Fischer (R-NE)• Martin Heinrich (D-NM)• Ted Cruz (R-TX)• Tim Kaine (D-VA)• Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
The plutocrats who put Ted Cruz in office have a very long list of nihilistic expectations attached to their boy-- and he's been the most outspoken freshman in the Senate, short on policy but very long on bombastic politics... exactly what his backers were hoping for. The other freshman not sitting back and marking time for six years is Elizabeth Warren, the polar opposite of Cruz. No bombast and minimal politics-- all policy, all the time. She's already seen as a Democratic leader in the finest of traditions. Right from the beginning, Cruz has been constantly compared-- extremely accurately-- with disgraced Wisconsin neo-fascist Senator Joe McCarthy.Beltway traditionalists-- conservative by nature-- may not care about all the noise Cruz is making, but they are steaming that that woman from Harvard thinks she can waltz right into their Senate and start proposing legislation!Republicans, eager to please their masters on Wall Street, have long-vowed to wreck Warren's brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Board and they managed to block her choice of directors, Rich Cordray for nearly two years. On July 16 her persistence paid off and every single Democrat plus 17 Republicans voted for cloture on the nomination, shutting down Mitch McConnell's deranged filibuster once and for all. The only opponents, hard core right-wing obstructionists, were Republican extremists like Ted Cruz (R-TX), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), John Cornyn (R-TX), Richard Burr (R-NC), Mike Lee (R-UT), David Diapers Vitter (R-LA), and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-KKK).Oops... I said those hard core right-wing obstructionists oppose everything. That's not accurate. Just a few weeks earlier every single one of them had voted in favor of confirming Obama's absolutely horrible neoliberal nominee for U.S. Trade Representative, Michael Froman. Every Republican joined almost every Democrat in supporting one of the 2 or 3 worst of Obama's nominees. It passed with 93 votes, almost unheard of in this obstructionist Senate! Barbara Boxer voted "Present" and 4 Democrats voted NO: Joe Manchin (D-WV), Carl Levin (D-MI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and... Elizabeth Warren. The video up top explains Warren's decision to oppose Froman, something that sent corporate whore and lobbyist-to-be, Cardinal Max Baucus (D-MT), into orbit. If Warren is ruffling feathers of cancerous growths like Baucus, she's off to a great start.
Warren came to the Senate seven months ago with a strong sense of destiny. She asked for the Kennedy desk on the Senate floor, the famous perch once occupied by former President John F. Kennedy and former Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), one of the chamber’s most coveted pieces of furniture.When Reid gave it to her, it caused some grumbling on the Democratic side of the aisle.“People were saying, ‘I can’t believe she has the Kennedy desk after only being here a few months. John Kerry had to wait for years to get that desk,’” said a senior Democratic aide, who noted that former Sen. Kerry (D-Mass.) was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee by the time he got to sit at Kennedy’s desk.Peter Ubertaccio, a political science professor at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, said Warren has the delicate task of trying not to overshadow senior colleagues who are not as well known.“She is trying to balance some very difficult things as a junior senator who has some star power. She is trying not to completely overshadow other colleagues while advancing some issues for which she’s become well known,” he said....Most other freshmen senators have kept a low profile as they try to ingratiate themselves with senior colleagues and learn arcane procedural rules. Not Warren.She’s been emboldened by a national prominence that outshines colleagues who have served several terms.Warren topped Hillary Clinton in a straw poll of attendees at the Take Back the American Dream conference held last month in Washington. A majority of the attendees also said they wanted to see a female president after 2016.Warren does not have to worry about chatting up reporters from major newspapers or cable news producers to get attention, as some of her colleagues do. Instead, she often blows by members of the press with the excuse that she’s on her way to a meeting or too busy. This has miffed some reporters, who wonder if she’s already grooming herself for a White House bid....Warren also has fans and friends on both sides of the aisle.While some Republicans complain about her professorial demeanor, which they say contains more than a hint of arrogance, they acknowledge she can also be warm and personable.“She’s a very nice person and very friendly but she is very professorially arrogant,” said a senior GOP aide.Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), one of the elder statesmen of the Senate Democrats’ liberal faction, said colleagues view Warren “with reverence.”Rockefeller said he thoroughly enjoys having Warner as a colleague because she is “monumental in her intensity” and “she drives hard.”Warren asked Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) to serve as her Republican mentor as part of an informal program to foster bipartisan relations. They have had dinner together a few times, according to Corker, and worked together to introduce legislation to set up reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac-- the Jumpstart GSE Reform Act.Earlier this month, she and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) teamed up with colleagues to introduce a bill to break up the nation’s biggest banks through legislation that would rebuild a firewall between commercial and investment banking.
Many Americans-- myself included-- feel it's way past time that we have a woman president. Garden variety Democrats and nearly the entire non-right-wing Establishment envisions that being Hillary Clinton. Yeah, yeah, yeah... better than Chris Christie or Rubio or Cruz or whatever sack of stinking garbage the Republicans nominate... but is that how we should pick our leaders? Elizabeth Warren might not be the slam dunk on election day Hillary Clinton is, but she would in all likelihood be the best president almost anyone alive and ambulatory has ever experienced as an adult. And if stuff she says, like the quote below, makes life "difficult" for her colleagues... regular Americans will love her all the more for it!
