Author Bio
• Birth—June 22, 1949
• Where—Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA
• Education—B.S., University of Houston; J.D., Rutgers University
• Currently—lives in Washington, DC and Massachusetts
Elizabeth Ann Warren (nee Herring) is an American academic and politician, who is the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts and a member of the Democratic Party. She was previously a Harvard Law School professor specializing in bankruptcy law. Warren is an active consumer protection advocate whose work led to the conception and establishment of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She has written a number of academic and popular works, and is a frequent subject of media interviews regarding the American economy and personal finance.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Warren served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). She later served as Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Barack Obama. In the late 2000s, she was recognized by publications such as the National Law Journal and the Time 100 as an increasingly influential public policy figure.
In September 2011, Warren announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate, challenging Republican incumbent Scott Brown. She won the general election on November 6, 2012, to become the first female Senator from Massachusetts. She was assigned to the Senate Special Committee on Aging; the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee; and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
Warren is in favor of increasing the minimum wage and has argued that if the minimum wage had followed increases in worker productivity in the United States, it would now be at least $22 an hour.
Early life, education, and family
Warren was born on June 22, 1949, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to working class parents Pauline (née Reed) and Donald Jones Herring. She was their fourth child, with three older brothers. When she was twelve, her father, a janitor, had a heart attack—which led to many medical bills, as well as a pay cut because he could not do his previous work. Eventually, this led to the loss of their car from failure to make loan payments. To help the family finances, her mother found work in the catalog-order department at Sears and Elizabeth began working as a waitress at her aunt's restaurant.
She became a star member of the debate team at Northwest Classen High School and won the title of "Oklahoma's top high-school debater" while competing with debate teams from high schools throughout the state. She also won a debate scholarship to George Washington University at the age of 16. Initially aspiring to be a teacher, she left GWU after two years to marry her high-school boyfriend, Jim Warren.
She moved to Houston with her husband, who was a NASA engineer. There she enrolled in the University of Houston and was graduated in 1970 with a degree in speech pathology and audiology. For a year, she taught children with disabilities in a public school, based on an "emergency certificate," as she had not taken the education courses required for a regular teaching certificate.
Warren and her husband moved to New Jersey for his work where, after becoming pregnant with their first child, she decided to become a stay-at-home mom. After her daughter turned two, Warren enrolled at the Rutgers School of Law–Newark. She worked as a summer associate at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. Shortly before her graduation in 1976, Warren became pregnant with her second child, and began to work as a lawyer from home, writing wills and doing real estate closings.
After having two children, Amelia and Alexander, she and Jim Warren divorced in 1978. In 1980, Warren married Bruce Mann, a Harvard law professor, but retained the surname, Warren.
Political affiliation
Warren voted as a Republican for many years saying, "I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets." She states that in 1995 she began to vote Democratic because she no longer believed that to be true, but she says that she has voted for both parties because she believed that neither party should dominate.
Career
During the late-1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s, Warren taught law at several universities throughout the country, while researching issues related to bankruptcy and middle-class personal finance. Warren taught at the Rutgers School of Law–Newark during 1977–1978, the University of Houston Law Center from 1978 to 1983, and the University of Texas School of Law from 1981 to 1987, in addition to teaching at the University of Michigan as a visiting professor in 1985 and as a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin from 1983 to 1987.
She joined the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1987 and became a tenured professor. She began teaching at Harvard Law School in 1992, as a visiting professor, and began a permanent position as Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law in 1995.
In 1995 Warren was asked to advise the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. She helped to draft the commission's report and worked for several years to oppose legislation intended to severely restrict the right of consumers to file for bankruptcy. Warren and others opposing the legislation were not successful; in 2005 Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.
From November 2006 to November 2010, Warren was a member of the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion. She is a member of the National Bankruptcy Conference, an independent organization that advises the U.S. Congress on bankruptcy law. She is a former Vice-President of the American Law Institute and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Public life
Warren has had a high public profile; she has appeared in the documentary films, Maxed Out and Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. She has appeared numerous times on television programs including Dr. Phil and The Daily Show, and has been interviewed frequently on cable news networks and radio programs.
TARP oversight
On November 14, 2008, Warren was appointed by United States Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to chair the five-member Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the implementation of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. The Panel released monthly oversight reports that evaluate the government bailout and related programs. During Warren's tenure, these reports covered foreclosure mitigation, consumer and small business lending, commercial real estate, AIG, bank stress tests, the impact of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) on the financial markets, government guarantees, the automotive industry, and other topics.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Warren was an early advocate for the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The bureau was established by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed into law by President Obama in July 2010. In anticipation of the agency's formal opening, for the first year after the bill's signing, Warren worked on implementation of the bureau as a special assistant to the president. While liberal groups and consumer advocacy groups pushed for Obama to nominate Warren as the agency's permanent director, Warren was strongly opposed by financial institutions and by Republican members of Congress who believed Warren would be an overly zealous regulator.
Reportedly convinced that Warren could not win Senate confirmation as the bureau's first director, Obama turned to former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray and in January 2012, over the objections of Republican Senators, appointed Cordray to the post in a recess appointment.
2012 election - U.S. Senate
On September 14, 2011, Warren declared her intention to run for the Democratic nomination for the 2012 election in Massachusetts for the United States Senate. The seat had been won by Republican Scott Brown in a 2010 special election after the death of Ted Kennedy. A week later, a video of Warren speaking in Andover became popular on the internet. In it, Warren replies to the charge that asking the rich to pay more taxes is "class warfare," pointing out that no one grew rich in America without depending on infrastructure paid for by the rest of society, stating:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.... You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
President Barack Obama later echoed her sentiments in a 2012 election campaign speech.
Warren ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination, and won it on June 2, 2012, at the state Democratic convention with a record 95.77% of the votes of delegates. She was endorsed by the Governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. Warren and her opponent Scott Brown agreed to engage in four televised debates, including one with a consortium of media outlets in Springfield and one on WBZ-TV in Boston.
Results by Municipality
Warren encountered significant opposition from business interests. In August 2012, Rob Engstrom, political director for the United States Chamber of Commerce, claimed that "no other candidate in 2012 represents a greater threat to free enterprise than Professor Warren." She nonetheless raised $39 million for her campaign, the most of any Senate candidate in 2012.
Warren received a primetime speaking slot at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, immediately before Bill Clinton, on the evening of September 5, 2012. Warren positioned herself as a champion of a beleaguered middle class that "has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered." According to Warren, "People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's the painful part: They're right. The system is rigged." Warren said that Wall Street CEOs "wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs" and that they "still strut around congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them."
Native American controversy
In April 2012, the Boston Herald drew attention to Warren's law directory entries from 1986 to 1995, in which she had self-identified as having Native American ancestry. Because of these entries, Harvard Law School had added her to a list of minority professors in response to criticisms about a lack of faculty diversity. Warren said that she was unaware that Harvard had done so until she read about it in a newspaper. She said that Native American ancestry was a part of her family folklore.
The New England Historical Genealogical Society found no documentary proof of Warren having Native American lineage, but a spokesperson from the Oklahoma Historical Society said "finding a definitive answer about Native American heritage can be difficult, not only because of intermarriage, but also because some Native Americans opted not to be put on federal rolls, while others who were not Native American did put their names on rolls to get access to land."
Her ethnicity claims became the focus of the media's election coverage for a certain time, during which her opponents bought ads asking her for explanations and to "come clean about her motivations" and some members of the Cherokee Nation asked how her claim influenced universities interested in hiring her. Colleagues and supervisors at the schools where she had worked publicly supported her statement that she did not receive preferential treatment. In polls, 72% of voters said the issue would not impact their vote in the election.
Tenure
On November 6, 2012, Warren defeated incumbent Scott Brown with a total of 53.7% of the votes. She is the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts, as part of a sitting U.S. Senate that has 20 female senators currently in office, the largest female U.S. Senate delegation in history, following the November 2012 elections. In December 2012, Warren was assigned a seat on the Senate Banking Committee, the committee that oversees the implementation of Dodd-Frank and other regulation of the banking industry. Warren was sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden on January 3, 2013. Upon John Kerry's resignation to become United States Secretary of State, Warren became the state's senior senator after having served for less than a month, making her the most junior senior senator.
At Warren's first Banking Committee hearing on February 14, 2013, she pressed several banking regulators to answer when they had last taken a Wall Street bank to trial and stated, "I'm really concerned that 'too big to fail' has become 'too big for trial.'" Videos of Warren's questioning became popular on the internet, amassing more than 1 million views in a matter of days. At a Banking Committee hearing in March, Warren questioned Treasury Department officials why criminal charges were not brought against HSBC for its money laundering practices. With her questions being continually dodged and her visibly upset, Warren then compared money laundering to drug possession, saying "if you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail... But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night."
In May, Warren sent letters to Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve, questioning their decisions that settling rather than going to court would be more fruitful.
In May 2013, Warren introduced her first bill, the Bank on Student Loans Fairness Act, which would allow students to take out government education loans at the same rate that banks such as Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase pay to borrow from the federal government. Suggesting that students should get "the same great deal that banks get," Warren proposed that new student borrowers be able to take out a federally subsidized loan at 0.75%, the rate paid by banks, compared with the current 3.4% student loan rate. Endorsing her bill days after its introduction, Independent Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders stated: "the only thing wrong with this bill is that [she] thought of it and I didn't" on The Thom Hartmann Program. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/12/2014.)