According to a report in POLITICO this morning, President Obama made a fruitless appeal to Elizabeth Warren to back the student loan deal he hashed out with Senate leaders. The President tried persuading Warren to support the bill and she rebuffed his approach by bashing it on the Senate floor.
It’s not exactly surprising. Warren has been very vocal about her opposition to usurious rent seeking — that she would oppose public sector institutions for doing it shows consistency (even if she did vote for Jack Lew’s confirmation). Daniel Luzer wrote about why the deal “pretty much sucks” over on our College Guide blog – interest rates for graduate students could climb as high as 8.55 percent over the next few years. In other words, thumbing her nose at this sort of legislation is Senator Warren’s bread and butter.
Yet POLITICO’s report (emphasis mine) reads like her constituents and political observers don’t expect her to engage in knock-down drag-outs to pull the Democratic Party establishment further to the left.
This wasn’t an isolated incident; after nearly seven months in office, Warren has staked out firm ground to the left of the president and Senate Democratic leaders. She has called for prosecuting the actors in the financial meltdown; urged Senate leaders to invoke the “nuclear option” to help confirm Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency she helped create; and was one of just four senators to vote against Obama’s U.S. Trade Representative nominee, demanding more transparency on trade agreements.
For someone elected as a liberal darling after facing opposition for the CFPB job — and whose name is often seen alongside “2016” — Warren’s causing some heartburn for her fellow Democrats.
The rag’s desire to treat politicians like roid raging professional wrestlers is particularly deplorable in this case because of its editorial slant — painting the Democratic Party like the left-wing equivalent of an increasingly extremist GOP on fiscal and labor issues, and painting Warren as some sort of modern day Rosa Luxembourg for fighting a president who is as Wall Street friendly as any other.
Gotta win that morning somehow, though.
