Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic frontrunner to challenge Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., might be learning that her favorite whipping boy can double as a golden goose.
Warren accepted $1,000 in campaign money from lobbyist Robert Raben, the Boston Herald reports, whose firm has earned over $800,000 from General Electric over the last 8 years.
Such a small donation, even from a lobbyist, might not pose a problem to another candidate, but Warren has made criticisms of General Electric and their “army of lobbyists” the focal point of her stump speeches.
She said last month in an appearance on Morning Joe that GE should not be able to “get an army of lobbyists, to get a complicated tax code that has just those little special openings for it.” More recently, Warren said that “the true divider here is between the very large, who can hire the army of lobbyists and lawyers, and the rest of us, whether it’s small business, small banks, family.”
She added that “GE isn’t looking for an easy-to-understand tax code. They like a tax code that is literally thousands and thousands of pages long, for which little benefits can be hidden back on page 694 and 1222 paragraph 3.” And how does GE hide benefits in the tax code? “They have the lobbyists to get those in,” Warren explained.
Warren is right to criticize the unhealthy ties between lobbyists and the government. The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney often exposes those relationships in his writing.
She should admit, though, that she crossed “the true divider” between lobbyists and the rest of us when she accepted that campaign donation. If she wants to stay consistent and keep up her anti-lobbyist rhetoric, she should return the money.
