Inside Biden and Warren's years-long feud

[PDittie]

On a February morning in 2005 in a hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Joe Biden confronted Elizabeth Warren over a subject they’d been feuding over for years: the country’s bankruptcy laws. Biden, then a senator from Delaware, was one of the strongest backers of a bill meant to address the skyrocketing rate at which Americans were filing for bankruptcy. Warren, at the time a Harvard law professor, had been fighting to kill the same legislation for seven years. She had castigated Biden, accusing him of trying “to sell out women” by pushing for earlier versions of the bill. Now, with the legislation nearing a vote, Biden publicly grappled with Warren face to face.

Warren, Biden allowed, had made “a very compelling and mildly demagogic argument” about why the bill would hurt people who needed to file for bankruptcy because of medical debt or credit card bills they couldn’t pay. But Biden had what he called a “philosophic question,” according to the Congressional Record’s transcript of the hearing that day: Who was responsible? Were the rising number of people who filed for bankruptcy each year taking advantage of their creditors by trying to escape their debts? Or were credit card companies and other lenders taking advantage of an increasingly squeezed middle class?

More:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/12/biden-vs-warren-2020-democratic-primaries-bankruptcy-bill-225728

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Fine, let's stir up more fights! That worked so well last time.

[emulatorloo]

4. I remember all the times DU has gone ballistic over a Politico story

only to find out the next day that it was bullshit,

As the saying goes wish I had a dollar for every time that’s happened

[Hassin Bin Sober]

9. If we are not going to talk about records what are we going to use to differentiate? Hair? Smiles?

These are serious issues and legislation that has impacted millions.

These votes and arguments go right to the heart of the candidate’s values and judgment.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

10. So often these discussions of candidates' "faults" devolve into stupid arguments

about what somebody might have done or said or written forty years ago. Unless there's solid evidence that a candidate was the Zodiac Killer (allegedly Ted Cruz, lol), I don't give a rat's ass about what somebody might have done or said or written forty years ago. I want to know what they've done or said or written recently, relevant to currently important issues. I don't want to see thinly-veiled attempts at character assassination, backstabbing, or accusations without evidence that a candidate or their supporters are trolls, Republicans or Russian sympathizers. I do not want a replay of 2016 on DU. I want an understanding that all candidates have faults and none are perfect, but regardless of their imperfections they will be exponentially better than Trump, who is an existential threat and not just a bad president.

Most of all I want us to forgo the usual circular firing squad, evaluate the issues and candidates on their merits and not on their warts, and eventually unite behind someone who probably won't be ideologically pure enough for anybody but who can and will defeat Trump.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

2. I'm with Elizabeth!

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[shanny]

6. I'm with her.

[emulatorloo]

3. PoliticoDemsInDisarray!1!!1. It is their go-to narrative

Politico swings right and they like stirring the pot amongst Democrats.

That’s not to say one can’t get info from the site.

One just needs to read it with a big boulder of salt.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

5. We need to stop stirring our own pots.

[emulatorloo]

7. Yeah.

I fell for a divisive and decidedly troll-ish thread last night. I have to get better.

Also thinking of skipping out on DU Primary season this time, too much stress the last time out.

[Uncle Joe]

8. Elizabeth was right.

As the fight over the bill dragged on, Warren emerged as the most prominent defender of the Americans who would be hurt by making it harder to file for bankruptcy. As a Harvard law professor who built her career tracking the effects of bankruptcy, she led a charge against the legislation that helped prevent its passage for close to a decade. “The bankruptcy filing rate is a symptom,” Warren and 109 other bankruptcy and commercial law professors wrote in a letter to Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), who was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in 2005, on the eve of their final defeat. “It is not the disease. Some people do abuse the bankruptcy system, but the overwhelming majority of people in bankruptcy are in financial distress as a result of job loss, medical expense, divorce, or a combination of those causes.”

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/12/biden-vs-warren-2020-democratic-primaries-bankruptcy-bill-225728

I would wager it was a symptom from Reaganomics; which did nothing but continuously squeeze the middle class and poor while giving mega-bucks to the wealthy.

So the average American in the 1980s started turning more and more to credit cards just to pay everyday bills.


Thanks for the thread PDittie.