The killing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani on Iraqi soil has sharpened focus on Elizabeth Warren’s defense spending record.
The senator for Massachusetts, 70, received more criticism, mostly from liberal activists online, than the other top contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. The criticism was over her response to Soleimani’s death as the candidates campaigned last weekend for the first time since President Trump ordered the drone strike that targeted the general in Baghdad.
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“I hate to say this, but I don’t read all the coverage, about me or about anyone else,” Warren told reporters in Iowa when asked about comparisons between herself and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as the pair vie for liberal Democrats ahead of Iowa’s opening caucuses on Feb. 3.
Warren sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee and name-checks her three older brothers and their military service during her stump speech. But her rivals, particularly former Vice President Joe Biden, 77, see her emphasis on domestic policy as a vulnerability amid global security concerns and when the perception of the United States abroad is at a nadir.
Last summer and fall, Warren faced mounting pressure over her plans to pay for Medicare for All without a middle-class tax hike. Now, she’s coming under scrutiny for her past support of increased defense spending, particularly in her home state, and simultaneously the slashes she would make to the Department of Defense as commander in chief if she had a compliant Congress.
The Warren campaign didn’t immediately respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment, but, in her proposal to finance Medicare for All, she reiterated her calls for the elimination of the Pentagon’s Overseas Contingency Operations Fund. The senator, who didn’t back last year’s passage of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, said nixing the “slush fund” would free up about $798 billion over a decade for her single-payer healthcare vision. Yet proponents of the fund, originally set up for the Iraq War before paying for some U.S. military counterterrorism operations, argue getting rid of it would force the Defense Department “to cut base budgets and revise strategic priorities” because it offers “a political and fiscal safety valve to the [Budget Control Act] caps and threat of sequestration,” according to the Congressional Research Service.
More broadly, while cracking down on defense contractors and revolving-door lobbyists, Warren’s been hit by her opponents for shifting foreign policies, including adopting a more pro-Palestine posture toward Israel, among others.
She boasted about being against Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s nomination to the post over his connections with Raytheon, a defense contractor headquartered in Massachusetts that creates thousands of jobs and generates billions of dollars in revenue in the state. At the same time, a Raytheon spokesman told Politico in 2015 the business enjoyed “a positive relationship” with her, and employees have donated more than $25,000 to her campaigns since 2011. She stepped in to save General Dynamics from losing federal contracts as well, including in 2013 over the company’s problematic Army Manpack radios, and promised to save Westover Air Reserve Base from any cost-saving measures.
The senator has also flip-flopped on her position toward U.S. top diplomats. Last June, she vowed not to appoint campaign donors as ambassadors, but she voted in favor of some of former President Barack Obama’s bundlers nominated for ambassadorships, including former Ambassador to Argentina Noah Mamet, former Ambassador to Hungary Colleen Bell, and former United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization Ambassador Crystal Nix-Hines. And she didn’t voice opposition to the Trump administration’s European Union ambassador nominee Gordon Sondland, a key figure in the House Democrats’ impeachment investigation into the president over his dealings with Ukraine.
