2020: A Vision of the Future: Elizabeth Warren
By Gaurav Varma
Regular Witherly Heights contributor and political enthusiast Gaurav Varma presents his opinions on the Democratic candidates who have announced their candidacy for president of the United States in the 2020 election cycle.
Elizabeth Warren is the exact opposite of Barack Obama… at least campaign wise. President Obama largely governed as an incrementalist and spoke slowly and thoughtfully as chief executive. But when he was delivering his stump speeches or talking on the floor of the Democratic National Convention, no one could speak more eloquently and deliver more inspiring, unifying rhetoric than him. Elizabeth Warren is rapidly rising to become a frontrunner in the race to lead Obama’s party, but her style is nothing like his.
She doesn’t talk about the great American experiment or shared values, she talks about her plans to force those with net worths above fifty million dollars to pay a two percent marginal wealth tax and to ban elected officials from becoming lobbyists after leaving government. An argument can be made that as a candidate, Obama’s vagueness made him more electable and Warren’s specificity only harms her chances of beating President Trump. However, it cannot be argued that Warren’s many, many plans do not give voters a clearer idea of what her presidency would be like than Obama’s campaign gave about his.
Warren supports many of the same progressive proposals that Bernie Sanders popularized in his 2016 presidential run. For example, she supports eliminating tuition at all public colleges and universities, raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour, and has signed onto Sanders’s Medicare for All bill, although it should be noted that Warren has been noncommittal on the specifics of her plans for healthcare, most notably on whether private insurance should be entirely eliminated.
Warren has also proposed many measures to combat systemic corruption in Washington. As previously mentioned, she wants to ban elected officials and high-level appointees from becoming lobbyists after they leave government. The senator also wants to force candidates for federal office to release their tax returns, make high-level officials divest themselves of assets that may pose conflicts of interest, tax lobbying groups, and get rid of Super PACs. However, she has also flip-flopped on whether she would engage in high-dollar fundraisers if nominated, stating that she does not believe in unilateral disarmament when facing Republicans before reversing her position following backlash from the left-wing of her party.
Warren has dozens of other plans on topics ranging from public land use to electoral reform to criminal justice reform, many of which are very detailed in what they aim to accomplish, how they would be implemented, and the long-term effects they would have. Unfortunately, despite her excellent plans, there are a number of blemishes on her record in the Senate. For one, she voted to confirm Ben Carson to the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
It is hard to imagine a situation justifying a vote for someone with as little governmental/ bureaucratic experience as Ben Carson to lead a multi-billion dollar federal agency. An equally questionable decision is her support for a 700 billion dollar defense budget in 2017. At a time when public opinion both within the Democratic Party and among the general electorate is turning against American-led foreign intervention, such a vote makes it hard not to question Warren’s priorities in government spending.
Ultimately, Warren is far from the worst candidate Democrats could nominate in 2020. Her record in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and her numerous plans make her potential strengths as president very clear. However, some questionable votes in her short time in the Senate have made it clear to me that she is not my first choice in this primary.