Elizabeth Warren has attempted to sell herself as the candidate of a plethora of plans in the presidential primary. But look a bit closer at her career, and you’ll understand how half-baked her ideas tend to be. The Massachusetts Senator is solely responsible for handing President Trump an unconstitutional and unaccountable agency responsible for meddling across the financial industry.
Back when she was still a bankruptcy law professor at Harvard, Warren proposed what would become the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the aftermath of the Great Recession. President Barack Obama named her his special adviser as his administration worked to set up the agency, but given the vehement opposition of Republicans to the CFPB’s structure in the first place, Obama appointed Richard Cordray as the first director rather than Warren.
The appointment wasn’t galling because of who was appointed, but because a single person was given power over an entire regulatory agency, rather than a board of directors or some other more democratic structure.
The vast expansion of the executive branch over the past century is cause for concern enough, but the CFPB’s structure also marks a stark departure from the model used by the FDIC and the SEC, both of which are run by boards. When Warren designed the CFPB, she assumed that Obama would appoint her the sole director. He didn’t. Then, when Cordray left the post to run for governor of Ohio (he lost), Obama attempted to appoint Leandra English as his successor. Instead, Trump took advantage of the agency’s structure to give Mick Mulvaney the post and its near-dictatorial powers which are a feature, not a bug, of Warren’s first and most significant “plan.”
In the time since, the Trump administration has continued to poke holes in the CFPB’s design, most recently by asking the Supreme Court to hear a case that challenges whether a federal agency can be led by a single person that even the president cannot fire without cause.
In short, Warren is responsible for planning out an agency whose design has completely backfired on her intentions. CFPB’s failure, from her perspective, is catastrophic, in that Trump might just use it to solidify unitary executive theory before the Supreme Court.
This is our experience with Warren’s planning so far. So why should Democrats — or the country, for that matter — trust her to nationalize our entire healthcare industry as “Medicare for all” promises to do? Voters can overlook a goofy and gaffe prone Joe Biden promising to restore the federal government to boring, swampy normalcy, but can they do the same for an activist candidate who makes big promises and has a record of not knowing what she’s talking about?
Warren says that she has a plan for everything. But just look at her first big scheme and you get a pretty decent picture of just how well the rest will go.
