In The Progressive magazine article An Interview with Elizabeth Warren, there is a segment I want to emphasize.
Q: You have an amazing anecdote in The Two-Income Trap about Hillary Clinton and the bankruptcy bill, which she called “that awful bill” and opposed when her husband was President but voted for in 2001, though it didn’t pass then.
Warren: I give Hillary Clinton a lot of credit. When she was First Lady, I sat down with her in a hotel in Boston. I had all these graphs and charts, and she was crunching through a hamburger, listening, and asking a lot of questions, and she really got it. At first, she was resistant. After all, the White House was quietly supporting the banks’ bankruptcy bill. But boy, by about the third or fourth slide she was starting to say, “Oh,” and she could jump ahead. She got it.
Someone later told me there were skid marks on the floor in the White House from people reversing position on that bankruptcy bill when Hillary Clinton got back from Boston.
Q: And then those skid marks turned the other way again when she went to the Senate and soon thereafter voted for a similar bill.
Warren: That was the interesting thing. She stayed in the same place so long as she was in the White House. I believe that Mrs. Clinton was responsible for President Clinton’s veto of that bankruptcy bill. Ultimately, Congress passed the bill again in 2005 and George Bush signed it into law. But in that five-year period in between, eight million families went through the bankruptcy system, while the law was still intact. So the veto was important, and I believe she was the cause. And that’s what’s so disheartening. She changed her vote in the Senate. If Hillary Clinton, one of the strongest, most independent politicians of her generation, felt that she needed to conform her voting to the desires of the banking industry once she held elective office, what hope is there for the rest of the politicians?
This same anecdote is discussed starting at 56:35 in the video in the previous post Elizabeth Warren – The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.
The lesson Elizabeth Warren gave to Hillary Clinton was the explanation of how bad the bankruptcy bill was.
The lesson Hillary Clinton gave to Elizabeth Warren is that even if you understand the horrors of the bill and you convinced President Clinton to veto it, you may still eventually give in to the lobbying pressures once you become a Senator.
I would love to hear Elizabeth Warren’s plan to resist this pressure when she becomes the Senator from Massachusetts. Unfortunately President George H. W. Bush made the “Read my lips” assurance null and void. I have no idea what plan Elizabeth Warren could have to make sure she does not succumb.