Jim sat down with Sen. Elizabeth Warren ( @SenWarren ) to talk about range of issues, including her candidate, Hillary Clinton, some past criticism she's had for the Democratic nominee, and whether she really wanted a shot at the VP spot.
Jim Braude: Senator it's good to see you.
Elizabeth Warren: It's good to be here.
JB: So you have called him virtually every name in the book, virtually. But a couple of your Democratic colleagues in the House recently have said he's mentally unstable. Others have said he is intellectually limited. Do you share their view?
EW: My view on this is I'm just going to take his actions, and go with his actions. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a psychoanalyst here. I don't run tests on him and that's not my job. My job is to look at the things he actually does and the things he actually says and then to try to talk about those. And let me just say, what you're saying, I've gone after him called him every name. No what I've really done is tried to talk substantively about him. He claims he's a great businessman. OK let's examine that claim. He thinks he's going to fight back by calling people names then I'm going to talk about what it means.
JB: Well, you’ve called him a few names. You’ve called him a bully and a loser, and that, so you have called him.
EW: That's fair enough. But the point is it's grounded. I'm not out there trying to talk about small hands or whatever. It’s to talk about substance, about what it is that this man has put forward as his claim for why he should be president of the United States.
JB: Do you do your own tweets.
EW: Yeah
JB: You do?
EW: I have help, I want to say.
JB: What does that mean?
EW: Somebody else reads them.
JB: But you write them?
EW: Mostly.
JB: Do you want to tweet him about his position on nuclear weapons?
EW: OH MY GOD CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT
JB: Ok, I guess I tried.
EW: Yeah. There you go. But. Can you believe this? A man who asks the generals, why we are using our nuclear weapons more. I think that this is going to be one of, my guess, is Secretary Clinton's principal lines is to say get past all of it. You know Warren wants to talk about things like Donald Trump says he'll roll back financial regulations. I've promised to veto any bills that roll it back. Donald Trump says he'll get rid of health insurance for 20 million people. I promise to hang on to it. I think actually where Hillary Clinton's going to go, is my guess, right for the gut, and the gut is going to be do you really want Donald Trump's finger on the nuclear trigger. He'll go right from tweeting to hitting the nuclear button.
JB: Speaking of Secretary Clinton, and speaking of gut, I think everybody in America would agree that your endorsement of Hillary Clinton was a major moment in her campaign. But when you're standing up on the stage and you hear Sanders people chanting “Goldman-Sachs, we trusted you” what does that make you feel in your gut? What does that do to you?
EW: You know right now the way I see this is the gulf between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is enormous. And that's what propels me forward. And I want to be clear about this. Hillary Clinton is running on a progressive agenda and she has made not vague promises she has made clear commitments on what she will do to execute on that, including things that are entirely within her control, like she will veto any efforts to roll back the financial regulations put in place after the crash. My view is I support that agenda. I support her. I want to help her get elected and then I want to make sure she does what she says she's going to do to help her do that.
JB: Senator, one of the greatest liabilities you know is the trust factor. You wrote and I think it was called Two Income Trap you wrote about her let's call it conversion on a personal bankruptcy bill where she ended up in a position that that was anti-consumer and you basically said campaign money got her to the place from the wrong places. So what do you say to the person who's in that two thirds who doesn't find her honest or trustworthy, reads your words from admittedly 12, 10 years ago. Why should we trust her in 2016 that what she says is what she'll do?
EW: Well the way I see this is the commitments that she has made are clear and that it's up to all of us not just who help her get elected but then help her serve as president of the United States that there's no ambiguity about what it is that she has promised to do and that the energy of the people who help her get elected are is still going to be an energy that's going to help her do that.
JB: Any reason she shouldn't release these Goldman Sachs speeches?
EW: My view on it is has been clear all along. But it's up to the rule of law. My view all along is look pale.
JB: Release them?
EW: Yeah. She's going to her own decision about that. She's going to run her campaign the way she wants to run.
JB: My modus operandi in politics my whole life has been anytime someone has the ability to disclose something, it's not like a national security thing, and they choose not to, it is fair to draw a negative conclusion about what's in whether it's Donald Trump's tax returns or her Goldman speeches. Is that an unfair position to take?
EW: I mean of course people draw inferences from what's not there. I draw inferences all around. And look if you ask me the question do I worry about the influence of Wall Street in Washington. Up and down the line. The answer is 100 percent yes of course I worry. I worry from the time I wake up in the morning until I go to bed at night. But that's why I go back to what has been made explicit. Donald Trump says he is going to repeal all of the financial regulations we put in place after a crash that is estimated to have cost the American people 14 trillion dollars. Hillary Clinton has said explicitly she will veto any legislation that does that, man. That's as far apart as you can get. That really matters.
JB: Did you want to be vice president? Raise your right hand, I mean did you not want to be vice president of the United States?
EW: I'll tell you exactly what I told her. And that is given all that I see. I want to help. I want to help her get elected. And I want to help her serve as a successful president, whatever is the best way to make that happen. But this is the part you've got to understand, I love my job but my job works for me. I love this job.
JB: I think people know. But isn't the pace of change just painfully slow. I mean does that not drive you right over the edge.
EW: No it does not drive me over the edge because I don't have the luxury of saying up I'm going over the edge. For me it's about getting up and finding every single chink in place that you can make a difference. Let me tell you I think of this, I think of this like I'm scaling a sheer wall and it's you're constantly looking, where's the finger hold, you know where’s the toehold to get in because there are a lot of tools in the toolbox. Here’s an example. All those agencies out there. They have the power to make a lot of changes. The Department of Education can follow different policies in student loans and who gets, who gets, discharged if these for profit colleges have cheated someone. The Food and Drug Administration can follow different policies in terms of who's allowed to give blood and who isn't and whether or not they're going to actively discriminate against gay men. The Federal Reserve Bank is the one that signs off on whether those living wills for the too big to fail banks are realistic or in fact those banks have not only changed their practices but start shedding some of their risk. And those are places where you can find that hand-hold, help those agencies do their jobs, not for the industries but do their jobs for the American people.
JB: Let me argue the flip side for saying you and Katherine Clark, who was here a couple of weeks ago, filed what I think is a terrific amendment essentially modeled on what happened here. But expanding it some, this partial refill thing which basically says you can go in you have a prescription for 30 pills you can get only 10. And the way you expand it in Massachusetts, is you can say you can go back and get the other 20. That's fabulous, it was in the bill, whatever it's called the comprehensive addiction and something something, but at the same time Congress in this orgy of self-congratulations passes this $900 billion over five year opioid thing and doesn't fund it like infrastructure, like everything else. I mean it's almost like snake oil that's being sold to the American people.
EW: Actually can I just load on here while we're doing this. Look what's happening right now we Zika. So months and months ago the president consults with all of the scientists and they say OK look, kind of bottom line it's going to take about 1.9 billion dollars in order to fund the research we need and to make sure that local health outfits can deal with the mosquitoes. Right. So that's about what it's going to take. So the Democrats sign up. I was there in the Senate when they said OK let's put this bill forward $1.9 billion. This is crisis, guys let's do this. And the Republicans answer is No. So we go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and finally finally finally we get a compromise, a few weeks ago and a compromise is 1.1 billion, we don't like it. But you take as many life preservers as you can get. Right. So we say OK Democrats and Republicans in the Senate vote for lots of people. If it passes overwhelming. The thing comes back. Now from the House of Representatives they not only cut the money they say oh wait a minute as long as we're at it you've got to defund Planned Parenthood, you've got to take the money out of Ebola research, like what could go wrong there. Right. We haven't found a cure for that one. It's politics twenty-four seven for some of these Republicans. And we're not just talking OK as a matter of principle I think it should be this and you think it should be that, we're talking about family’s health. We're talking about the health of people in the United States and about the health of people around the world. And these Republicans have just put us in a place where they say we're just not going to fund it. We don't want to do that.
JB: We should say by the way on the opioid thing we're only seven no votes in both chambers.
EW: Yes, but without the money that we needed. So you're right. Let's take a victory lap. We've got a good provision in. We made some forward progress with the bill that Catherine and I did on partial fill. But the fact that the Republicans won't fund it means that much of this is just smoke and mirrors.
JB: This causes me anxiety and I don't even work there. Just two more quick things. This is probably a bad day to bring this up. I have criticized you on more than one occasion for being more accessible to national press than you are the folks back home. That's a fair charge is it?
EW: No it's not. No.
JB: That's it?
EW: That's it.
JB: You're as accessible to this world back home?
EW: I don’t go out and do a lot of press. I mostly spend my time doing my job. You know there are a lot of people who write about me and a lot of people who talk about me but I'm here at home sitting in this chair.
JB: You are. I know it was a bad time to do that. OK fine, speaking about writing about you, this is the last thing Senator. You know someone asked me the other day about you, how long has she been there. And my initial reaction was going to be like well I don’t know, eight or nine years. And then of course I realized you've been there a minute. You've been there three and a half years. Are there times when you go home at night and you say to yourself I was this relatively obscure, and I don't mean that in a critical way, Professor at a law school in Cambridge. And all of a sudden I am this, you're not going to like this, but you're this national heroine to a significant piece of the population to go home and say this is amazing this is happening to me at this stage in my life. Is there a piece of that.
EW: So can I just slightly restate it, but the way I see it is that I fought so hard for all those years I kept doing my research and I would say, oh my god this is terrible what's happening to America's families why it's happening, the big piece is that that the powerful are seizing the tools of government and making it work for them and America is no longer working for 90 percent of the country. And I tried to fight in the ways I knew to fight. I wrote books right. I blogged scholarly articles, I did extra footnotes you know. And one certain things went click click click. And I ended up down in Washington during the financial crash trying to put some accountability in the system. Next thing I know I was setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, just celebrated its birthday.
JB: Happy birthday.
EW: Well it has returned 11 billion dollars now to people who were cheated and then I ended up in the Senate race and it means I've got this opportunity to get out there and fight with a new set of tools. And so I feel this sense of profound responsibility to pick up those tools and use them as hard and as fast and as deep as I can every day. I came to this late. I truly believe America is running out of time. And so for me, it's get up early, run at it at 140 miles an hour and keep it up until you fall over asleep at night.
JB: And stop by WGBH along the way. Senator it's great to see you.
EW: Thank you so much.
JB: Thank you.
