I’ll tell you this: by 2016 or 2020, some of her positions may no longer seem like radical left-wing stuff at all. Take SSM as an obvious example: until recently it was a lefty position and very unpopular. Today, not so much. Gun control may be moving in that direction. Immigration’s almost there. Your entire agenda may be a dinosaur. Probably not, but that sometimes looks like the way things are trending, don’t you agree?
And by 2024 or 2028 (she and I should live so long), radical lefty positions may be MOR plain vanilla. EW could be to the right of center someday if trends continue as they have been. Won’t THAT be nice?
But your party keeps denouncing that campaign rhetoric as dangerously extreme. He campaigned in favor of his health plan, and standard GOP talking points made that out to be redistributive, confiscatory, unconstitutional socialist ravings.
Can’t have it both ways. Well, you can, if it makes you feel better, but I’d prefer it if you guys would figure out if he’s a dangerous radical (in which case you’re living in the wrong country, because he seems pretty popular) or a pretty right-wing Democrat (in which case, all the nutjob tactics–filibustering, birtherism, name-calling–seems like pure petulance and racism.)
Gun control, no way. Democrats actually gave up on that issue until Newtown, but they miscalculated. Immigration is an issue on which few have coherent views on, so I don’t know what to think there. Social issues of course, the country is always moving left. But on economic issues, we’ve kept on moving right. Thus Obamacare basically being what Republicans supported in the 90s. Democrats had a much better offer from Nixon and turned it down because they thought they could do better later.
The way I see it, we keep on moving towards more and more permissiveness. So that means we’ll continue to become more libertarian, which works for me.
A pity the rest of the Committee didn’t. Have a look at the first few seconds of the video - it’s Warren, the Committee chair and a whole lot of empty seats.
A politician who actually cares about the people rather than the corporate paymasters? Absolutely radical! And yes, that’s definitely an indictment of both the Senate and the electorate.
You would think wanting to know whether the President can order drone strikes against Us ciitzens on US soil wouldn’t be extreme, but for some reason Rand Paul was the only guy willing to push the issue.
Extreme in a political sense can often mean just taking obvious stands that are only obvious to anyone who doesn’t live in the Beltway.
However, she is very likely to end up being the most liberal Senator according to the various groups that keep score, which is not the best position to be in when you’re trying to appeal to a broad electorate. I hate to compare her to Dennis Kucinich because she’s about 50 times smarter than he is, but her political positioning is going to make her only marginally more viable than he was.
Her political positioning is going to do her well. She would destroy an establishment, status quo upholding politico like Hillary in 2016. People are waking up.
People are waking up, sure, but they aren’t necessarily waking up to join in with the left. Just as many are waking up to join in with the right. Rand Paul represents the same type of change on the right that Warren does on the left. And 850,000 people stand with Rand on facebook, compared to less than half that for Warren.
True, people are waking up, but they are just as likely if not more likely to stand with reformists like Paul.
Yeah there are a lot of Libertarians on the internet, and they’re much more annoying than their actual number in the population would have you believe by the constant invasion of Paulbots on otherwise decent conversations.
I’m glad she brought up the fact that Americans get charged with all kinds of federal crimes based on vague federal statutes. I just wish she’d called for those laws to be repealed, rather than wanting to use those vague laws to find some pretense to jail bankers. Ah, progressive justice at its finest. “Bad things happened, find something to charge them with! We’ve written ten thousand new laws, there’s gotta be one in there that they broke!”
I’m a Republican and don’t really like the arguments as he’s making them but he’s correct in part. The GOP for someone who came up as Republican in the late 70s is a lot more conservative on many issues than they were back then. It’s also characterized by a lot of very inflexible positions. It’s the difference between there being pro-choice Republicans in the past where now they could never win a primary and guys like Bush I and Reagan raising some taxes when they had to versus people taking pledges to never raise taxes ever now.
That’s really good for the Democrats because moving so far right and becoming inflexible cedes a lot of votes to them. But at the same time it’s true on a lot of issues the Democrats have moved right with the Republicans. I didn’t vote for Obama or Clinton but as a Republican I was/am mostly fine with both of them on most issues. Now, like I said much of the party has gone so far right they don’t recognize Obama is a true centrist by American standards and basically a conservative by international standards. Now, the Democratic Party is still the only place you’ll get major talk on stuff like gun control but a lot of votes still aren’t there…Feinstein’s Amendment was said to have fewer than 40 votes according to Reid.
It would be a significant departure from the current Democratic trajectory to pick someone so far to the left on the economic issues as Elizabeth Warren. I’ll also note it’s funny to see her picking on the regulators. The President gets to set regulatory agendas and bears sole responsibility to how we’ve been regulating banks. She doesn’t want to attack a sitting President from her own party so picks on appointed regulators who follow the President’s marching orders? That’s basically going after the people who can’t really change how they do their jobs because they answer to the President (this is mostly true even for non-at will regulators) instead of bringing whatever problems you have with banking regulators up with the guy who runs the show.
Wait, what? While the President in theory could uproot and reform the entire financial regulatory system, he’d have to get it past Congress - and Congressional committees, who aren’t terribly big on giving up power, currently oversee important parts of the regulatory structure. No Senator or Congressman is going to vote for a bill that makes their own currently very influential committee obsolete.
The US financial regulatory system is a mess of different bodies who are and always have been poorly coordinated. If you thought healthcare reform was tough, this would be tougher. The most Warren can do is beat up the existing regulators for failing to do the jobs they currently have properly, and even that is an uphill struggle. Let’s not pretend she’s taking the easy road here.
To actually change the law, yes the President must do all that you said. That’s not what I, or really Warren is talking about. If Warren thought we just had a problem with our laws it’d make no sense to go after the sheriff instead of the lawmakers. No, Warren is asserting regulators and prosecutors aren’t doing their jobs. You are absolutely correct that there are tons of regulatory bodies, but many of them are headed by people who report to the President. Not to mention the Attorney General takes marching orders from the Presidsent directly. The SEC is run by a quasi-independent Presidentially appointed committee sure, but they have no monopoly on investigating banking misdeeds. One of the things Warren has been very vocal about is lack of prosecutions and that is 100% on the President through the AG. When past AGs have wanted to focus on things like civil rights prosecutions or mafia activity none of that was going on without ultimate approval by the President for those initiatives. Warren should be asking why the FBI hasn’t set up a special task force to investigate the banks and why the DoJ isn’t working with that task force to make cases. Acting like the President doesn’t set these initiatives is frankly crazy. Even entities that are supposed to be quite independent of the President, like the Federal Reserve, listen when he talks to them.
For positions like AG or head of the FBI, they serve at the pleasure of the President.