The New Yorker: The Virtual Candidate (Warren, Clinton and a bankruptcy bill)
The relationship between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, the Party’s most likely Presidential nominee, goes back to the second half of the Clinton Administration. Warren told me recently that the most dramatic policy fight of her life was one in which Bill and Hillary Clinton were intimately involved. She recalls it as the “ten-year war.” Between 1995 and 2005, Warren, a professor who had established herself as one of the country’s foremost experts on bankruptcy law, managed to turn an arcane issue of financial regulation into a major political issue.
In the late nineteen-nineties, Congress was trying to pass a bankruptcy bill that Warren felt was written, essentially, by the credit-card industry. For several years, through a growing network of allies in Washington, she helped liberals in Congress fight the bill, but at the end of the Clinton Administration the bill seemed on the verge of passage. Clinton’s economic team was divided, much as Democrats today are split over economic policy. His progressive aides opposed the bill; aides who were more sympathetic to the financial industry supported it. Warren targeted the one person in the White House who she believed could stop the legislation: the First Lady. They met alone for half an hour, and, according to Warren, Hillary stood up and declared, “Well, I’m convinced. It is our job to stop that awful bill. You help me and I’ll help you.” In the Administration’s closing weeks, Hillary persuaded Bill Clinton not to sign the legislation, effectively vetoing it.
But just a few months later, in 2001, Hillary was a senator from New York, the home of the financial industry, and she voted in favor of a version of the same bill. It passed, and George W. Bush signed it into law, ending Warren’s ten-year war with a crushing defeat. “There were a lot of people who voted for that bill who thought that there was going to be no political price to pay,” Warren told me.
<snip>
The following year, Bill Clinton was replaced by George W. Bush. A new version of the bill was introduced. In Warren’s 2003 book, “The Two-Income Trap,” she describes what happened next:
This time freshman Senator Hillary Clinton voted in favor of the bill. Had the bill been transformed to get rid of all those awful provisions that had so concerned First Lady Hillary Clinton? No. The bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not. As First Lady, Mrs. Clinton had been persuaded that the bill was bad for families, and she was willing to fight for her beliefs. Her husband was a lame duck at the time he vetoed the bill; he could afford to forgo future campaign contributions. As New York’s newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn’t coming from families in financial trouble. Senator Clinton received $140,000 in campaign contributions from banking industry executives in a single year, making her one of the top two recipients in the Senate. Big banks were now part of Senator Clinton’s constituency. She wanted their support, and they wanted hers—including a vote in favor of “that awful bill.”
<snip>
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-virtual-candidate
= new reply since forum marked as read
