Fred Barnes explains for the Weekly Standard why Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has more to worry about than insults from President Trump.
While Trump is an irritant to Warren, she has bigger problems. The most serious is what appears to be an openness by her party to lean a bit toward the center. This is not unusual before a midterm election. But Warren is bound to view it as a weakening of both her influence on Capitol Hill and her prospects of winning the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
That Democrats have the upper hand in 2018 is undisputed (except by Trump), and they want to maximize their gains. They’ve held on tightly to liberal positions on immigration and social issues, but other policies adopted in the Obama years are no longer sacrosanct.
Politico headlined a recent story “Warren at war with fellow Dems.” Indeed she is, and what’s noteworthy is she’s losing the most serious of the battles.
It involves a bipartisan measure to ease the sweeping banking regulations—the Dodd-Frank Act—passed after the 2008 financial crisis. Sixteen Democrats joined Republicans to push the new bill ahead. Warren, along with her left-wing allies, was furious.
And guess what? She’s a poor loser. At the Congressional Progressive Caucus, she said the vote by the 16 defectors “felt like a stab in the heart—not for me, but for all the homeowners who were cheated and the taxpayers who bailed out those banks.”
That wasn’t all. “It’s so hard to fight against all the money and all the lobbying, so hard when we fight and lose,” she said. “But, yeah, it’s worse when some of our teammates don’t even show up for the fight.” That moderate Democrats might vote for deregulation to aid their reelection in Trump states didn’t appear to cross her mind.