Sen. Elizabeth Warren centupled down on her anti-Wall Street message in an op-ed this weekend, saying it was time that Washington stop looking after “the tender fannies of billionaires” and craft a middle-class-first agenda.
Her proposals aren’t new: a recycled student debt relief idea that failed to gain traction during the midterm elections, the elimination of “corporate tax loopholes,” a federal minimum wage hike, Social Security expansion, and increased crackdowns on financial institutions, such as those institutions commit infractions.
“It’s not about big government or small government. It’s not the size of government that worries people; rather it’s deep-down concern over who government works for,” Warren wrote in The Washington Post. “People are ready to work, ready to do their part, ready to fight for their futures and their kids’ futures, but they see a government that bows and scrapes for big corporations, big banks, big oil companies and big political donors — and they know this government does not work for them.”
Notably, Warren couched her rhetoric in a perspective shared by many Republicans — that with a new Congress in town, lawmakers shouldn’t rush to legislate just for the sake of legislating. She had the same message for the president, too.
“The solution to [helping the middle class] isn’t a basket of quickly passed laws designed to prove Congress can do something — anything. The solution isn’t for the president to cut deals — any deals — just to show he can do business,” Warren wrote. “The solution requires an honest recognition of the kind of changes needed if families are going to get a shot at building a secure future.”
Those changes don’t align with the “lobbyists’ agenda,” Warren argues, which has included “tax deals that carefully protect the tender fannies of billionaires and big oil and other big political donors,” as well as “Wall Street banks that got taxpayer bailouts and now whine that the laws are too tough.”
Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican and one of the party’s leading thinkers, has also cautioned against a legislate-at-all-costs strategy, as well as a platform that favors “Big Business” and little more. The ends of Lee’s and Warren’s visions, however, are quite different; they don’t share ideological space.
“The GOP’s biggest branding problem is that Americans think we’re the party of Big Business and The Rich. If our ‘Show-We-Can-Govern’ agenda can be fairly attacked as giving Big Business what it wants — while the rest of the country suffers — we will only reinforce that unpopular image,” Lee wrote last week in The Federalist.
“[A] new Republican majority must also make clear that our support for free enterprise cuts both ways — we’re pro-free market, not simply pro-business. To prove that point, we must target the crony capitalist policies that rig our economy for large corporations and special interests at the expense of everyone else — especially small and new businesses.”
