Saturday, April 20, 2024

I’ve been a supporter of U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren since she first ran for Senate in 2011. I had seen her testify before a Congressional committee about her proposal for a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which eventually passed Congress. And when Republican senators refused to approve her to head the agency, she ran for Senate from Massachusetts and won (over a popular Republican senator).

When she started running for the Senate seat, we wanted to hold a “time” for her in our living room, which can hold 40 to 50 people. But the crowd coming to hear her got so large that we had to move it into our yard. When she arrived (on time), almost 200 people were waiting to hear her. And we weren’t disappointed.

Before I agreed to hold the event, I asked a Harvard Law professor neighbor about her, since Warren was also a professor at Harvard Law. He said that he had been on her hiring committee in the 1990s and they were thrilled to get her – and haven’t ever been disappointed. This man is not given to effusive praise, so the assessment carried a lot of weight with me.

Warren’s law specialty is bankruptcy and finance. This expertise guides her questioning of those testifying before Congressional committees, letting her point out “softness” in their responses.

She has thought deeply about people’s needs and has made plans to address many of them: student loans, immigration, health care, financial institutions that have taken advantage of ordinary people, well-heeled corporations and their lobbyists who can spend and spend and influence Congress to their advantage. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has already returned 12 billion dollars to people defrauded or mistreated by financial institutions, such as having their homes repossessed illegally.

An ace debater in school and persistent in pushing for her ideas, she won’t let Senate head Mitch McConnell push her around. The bully in the White House won’t get much traction with her.

She would be a president we could all be proud of. And, as a woman, I would love to see her be the first woman President.

You will be voting soon, if you haven’t already. Please consider U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Sara Mae Berman, Inman Square