Elizabeth Warren to Congress: Grandma "Will Be Left to Starve" If We Cut Social Security

Political MoJo

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Mon Nov. 18, 2013 3:31 PM PST

On Monday afternoon, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) delivered a speech on the Senate floor slamming those on Capitol Hill who want to cut Social Security in order to balance the budget, and calling on Congress to expand the program instead.
"This is about our values," the senator said, "and our values tell us that we don’t build a future by first deciding who among our most vulnerable will be left to starve."
Lawmakers have to come to an agreement to fund the government by mid-January, and some are floating Social Security cuts as a bargaining chip in a possible budget deal. Even President Barack Obama's last budget proposal contained cuts to the program.
Warren says slashing retirement benefits for elderly Americans is an absurd idea. Warren noted that Social Security payments are already stingy, averaging about $1,250 a month. Plus, an increasing number of Americans can no longer count on healthy pensions through their job. Two decades ago, 35 percent of jobs in the private sector offered workers a traditional pension that provided monthly payments retirees could rely on. Today, that number is only 18 percent. Some 44 million workers get no retirement help from their employers.
Because of the growing "retirement crisis" in America, Warren argued, "we should be talking about expanding Social Security benefits—not cutting them." She noted that several senators, including Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have been pushing for just that.
Seniors are not going to get more generous retirement benefits as long as the GOP-dominated House opposes the idea. But most Democrats have said they won't agree to entitlement cuts without new revenues, and Republicans refuse to raise revenues, so real cuts are unlikely, too. Rather than hashing out a grand bargain that includes cuts to the safety net, Congress will probably kick the can down the road, and come to another modest, last-minute, short-term budget accord early next year.
But Warren's speech was about more than staving off immediate cuts to retirement benefits. It was yet another move to cement her role as Congress' star defender of the middle class. Warren has said she will not run for president in 2016. But this is one of many issues on which she has staked out a position to the left of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is widely expected to run. In a speech at Colgate University last month, Clinton did not rule out the idea of limited cuts to entitlement programs as a means to reaching a budget deal.

Warren: If GOP Continues To Filibuster, Senate Has 'Duty' To Change Rules

 TPM Livewire 

 Catherine Thompson – November 13, 2013, 1:58 PM EST

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called for a Senate rules change Wednesday, calling GOP shutouts of President Barack Obama's judicial nominees "naked attempts to nullify the results of the last presidential election."
Warren blasted her Republican colleagues on the Senate floor for their filibuster of Nina Pillard, the third of Obama's nominees to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to have her confirmation stalled.

"If Republicans continue to filibuster these highly qualified nominees for no reason other than to nullify the President's constitutional authority, then senators not only have the right to change the filibuster rules, senators have a duty to change the filibuster rules," Warren said.
The freshman senator also turned the "court-packing" allegation leveled against President Barack Obama by the GOP on its head, accusing Senate Republicans of attempting to "rig" the lower court in favor of business interests.
"In the next five years, the D.C. Circuit will decide some of the most important cases of our time," she said, "including cases that will decide whether Wall Street reform will have real bite or whether it will just be toothless … These big industry players want business-friendly judges to help them out."
Warren struck that same populist chord in September when she warned of what she called "pro-corporate" trend in the Supreme Court, citing an academic study that counted the five conservative-minded judges currently sitting on the high court among the top 10 pro-corporate justices in a half century.
[h/t Huffington Post]
Correction: This post has been updated to reflect that Nina Pillard was the third of Obama's nominees to the D.C. Circuit to be blocked by Senate Republicans.

 

Elizabeth Warren: 'We Face A Clear Danger' In Campaign Finance Supreme Court Case 

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paulblumenthal@huffingtonpost.com


WASHINGTON -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) warned Thursday that a coming Supreme Court case that could ultimately eliminate certain campaign contribution limits is a "clear danger" that threatens to expand the influence of large and wealthy corporations on elections.
The case -- McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, set to be argued on Oct. 8 -- challenges the aggregate limit on campaign contributions that an individual donor can make in a single election. Currently, a donor may only give $123,300 in total, made up of sub-limits of $48,600 to candidates and $74,600 to party committees and PACs.
The plaintiff, Alabama businessman Shaun McCutcheon, hopes that the court will eliminate these limits, arguing earlier this year that the issue is "a very important First Amendment case about freedom of speech."
On Thursday, speaking at an event held by the Constitutional Accountability Center, Warren argued, "If the court continues in the direction of Citizens United, we may move another step closer to neutering Congress' ability to limit the influence of money in politics and another step closer to unlimited corporate contributions given directly to candidates and political committees."
Warren also endorsed the research of her former academic colleague, Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, on the framers of the Constitution's original definition of corruption and on the ways in which Congress has become warped by monied interests.
Lessig, who followed Warren Thursday with a presentation on his research, sought to frame the McCutcheon case, and the money-in-politics issue generally, in terms the conservative justices on the Supreme Court would respond to. Lessig and the Constitutional Accountability Center have filed an amicus brief in the McCutcheon case based on his research and arguments.
The Supreme Court -- most dramatically in the 2010 Citizens United decision -- has stated that the only type of corruption able to be regulated is quid pro quo, cash-for-votes corruption. But, according to Lessig, this is not the way the framers understood corruption and, thus, neither should the five conservative justices on the court.
Two chapters from the Federalist Papers are of particular interest to Lessig. In Federalist 52, James Madison writes that the federal government created by the Constitution should have at least one branch "dependent upon the people alone." In Federalist 57, Madison writes that the people on whom that branch depends should be "not the rich, more than the poor."
Lessig argued that the oversized reliance of members of Congress on their campaign donors is an institutional corruption of the dependence that Congress is supposed to have "upon the people alone." The foundation for his argument is a number of statements and writings by the framers concerning corruption of this nature -- evidence a constitutional originalist would take into consideration.
Lessig said he had found at least 325 specific instances in which the framers used the term corruption (collected here in a Tumblr blog). Of those, only six explained corruption as a trading of favors, while there were 29 mentions of corruption as an "improper dependence." He also found that 57 percent of the mentions of corruption were about institutions, rather than individuals.
This argument is designed to paint into a corner the five conservative justices, who commonly favor eliminating campaign finance limits, by suggesting that their efforts conflict with the original intent of the framers.
In the McCutcheon case, he argued, the elimination of campaign contribution limits would likely reduce the overall number of donors to campaigns and, thus, make Congress even more dependent upon an even smaller slice of donors, who are not representative of the people. Lessig used research done by National Institute of Money in State Politics executive director Ed Bender that shows that contribution limits expand the number of donors while the elimination of contribution limits reduces the number of donors.
"If you eliminate the cap on aggregate contributions, the number of funders in the system will fall even more than it has so far," Lessig said. "And if the number of funders drop, then the dependence corruption within the system, as I've just described it, only gets worse."
But Lessig said he is optimistic that the justices will look at the McCutcheon case and the original definition of corruption used by the framers and form a strong majority to uphold the aggregate campaign contribution limits.