Elizabeth Warren

• Born: June 22, 1949
• Place of Birth: Oklahoma City, OK

Before running for president of the United States, Elizabeth Warren was perhaps best known for having chaired the US Senate's Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). She and her committee were responsible for monitoring the state of the markets, reviewing the US regulatory system, and overseeing the US Treasury as it dispersed TARP funds. TARP was part of the larger Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which was passed in October 2008 in response to the global economic crisis of the late 2000s. While serving as a chair of the COP, Warren was also the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, a consumer advocate, and the author of several books on personal bankruptcy and the economic health of families in the early twenty-first century. Her success as a US senator led her to mount a campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential election. She was reelected to a third term in the US Senate in November 2024.

Early Life & Background

Elizabeth Warren was raised in Oklahoma. She was the youngest child of parents who lived through the Great Depression and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, and their experiences and personal histories were very much a part of her upbringing. Her father held many jobs in order to stay in Oklahoma—he was an apartment maintenance worker during Warren's childhood. Warren had three older brothers and describes her childhood as typically middle class.

Graduating from high school at the age of sixteen, Warren entered George Washington University in Washington, DC, on a full debate scholarship. She initially thought that she would pursue a teaching degree but shifted her focus to working with children with brain injuries. Married at nineteen, Warren graduated with a degree in speech pathology and audiology. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Houston in 1970.

After graduation, Warren worked in the public schools for a year, and then went back to school to take education courses. Feeling that she was not really enjoying the work, Warren had her first child, a daughter, and stayed home for a couple years before entering Rutgers Law School. She gave birth to her second child, a son, three weeks after receiving her law degree from Rutgers in 1976. Warren decided to set up her own law practice in New Jersey, where she practiced real estate and corporate law.

A short time later, someone at Rutgers called Warren because a law professor failed to show up to teach a class and they needed someone to take the course. She ended up taking the job, which led to her teaching career. She went on to return to the University of Houston for a tenured position. She then divorced her husband and moved to the University of Texas. She remarried another professor, Bruce Mann, taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and then was offered a position at Harvard University in 1995.

Career Highlights

As a professor and researcher, Warren focused her efforts on personal bankruptcy. As she stated in a 2007 interview with Harry Kreisler, she initially thought that her research would allow her to rout out cheaters, yet what she found when she began to compile the data was that many of those who were declaring personal bankruptcy were hard-working middle-class families. For reasons such as a divorce, medical issues, or job loss, many families were overwhelmed with debt. Her research led to her appointment as chief advisor on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. She was invited to be on the committee by former US Representative Mike Synar, and agreed to serve on the condition that she would be insulated from politics and the public. When Synar developed brain cancer and died later that year, Warren felt obliged to take a more active role on the commission, as she felt that many of those serving either misunderstood bankruptcy or wanted to use the commission's findings in the wrong way.

Her position on the committee led to her involvement in helping to develop public policy. According to Warren, when she began working with legislators, she noted a conflict between what her research was showing about personal bankruptcy and what legislators wanted to hear. She was constantly running up against credit and banking lobbyists who wanted public policy crafted to protect their interests, and she failed to convince legislators that those declaring bankruptcy did not neatly fall into typical stereotypes that helped to advance that pro-business legislation. Warren's research reveals much about why she feels that families experience bankruptcy at such alarming rates—that families spent 80 percent more on mortgage payments; 75 percent more on healthcare insurance; and 60 percent more on cars than they did a generation before.

Warren used the bankruptcy law (the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005) as an example of lobbyist influence. The law was initially developed in 1998 and worked its way to the House and Senate. As written, Warren claims, the law unfairly hurt women and single mothers with children. The law passed the House (in 1998) and Senate (in 2000) but was vetoed by President Bill Clinton in 2000, before he left the White House. It resurfaced in 2005—passed through Congress and was signed into law by President George W. Bush. Warren claimed that as a scholar and professor, she was unable to clearly interpret the law, which she claimed was written by lobbyists and paid for by credit card companies, and which makes it much more difficult for individuals to declare bankruptcy.

Warren has published her findings in numerous articles and several books, including The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (2003) and All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan (2005), both written with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi. Warren continued her research into personal bankruptcy, with later research focusing on the medical issues and its impact on families and the middle class.

In 2008, Warren was appointed to the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) by Senator Harry Reid. The Congressional Oversight Committee was in charge of overseeing the dispensation of funds from the US Treasury and to report to Congress on the state of the financial markets and the regulatory system. The committee worked in concert with the Special Inspector General for the TARP and the Government Accountability Office (GAO). In her February 2009 testimony before the House Financial Services Committee Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Warren stated that the commission's ultimate goal was to evaluate whether the TARP program was a benefit to American families and the national economy. She also reported that the committee had found that the US Treasury had purchased assets from banks above their value, about $78 billion more than the asset value. As chair, she voiced her concern over the lack of a justification for the overpayment from Treasury, acknowledging at the same time that the fast-moving nature of the bailout. At that time, Warren also highlighted the committee's responsibility to mitigate the issue of mortgage foreclosures.

Following its formation, the COP suffered from criticism that Warren was distracted by her own concerns over the plight of the middle class. She also stated publicly that the committee had more questions than it had answers, and was in danger of being divided politically. The June report to the House Financial Services Committee included an "Additional View" addendum in which a Republican member, Jeb Hensarling, claimed that the COP was being distracted from its mandate.

Some of this criticism was true, as evidenced in the COP's June report, where the committee addressed "stress tests" that had been applied to banks by the Federal Reserve Board and other regulators. The COP reported that the tests were "conservative and reasonable," but that more information was required about the findings and the test methodology. Warren also asked for subpoena power in order to get the necessary information it needed from the Federal Reserve.

In June 2009, President Barack Obama proposed the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) as part of a larger effort aimed at regulatory reform. The idea was proposed by Elizabeth Warren in a 2007 article. Warren claimed that the agency would protect consumers from risky products, which ultimately protects the health of the financial system. Her appointment as head of the CFPB was blocked by congressional Republicans, however.

CNN reported in April 2010 that Warren was among those being considered by Obama as a potential United States Supreme Court nominee. Although she was not nominated, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2010 and again in 2017.

In 2012, Warren was elected to the US Senate; she was the first woman to be elected from Massachusetts. As senator, Warren sat on the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, the Committee on Armed Services, the Special Committee on Aging, and the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Her goals included student debt relief, expanded middle-class tax credits, greater financial transparency within government, and an end to the opioid addiction epidemic. Warren was selected as the strategic policy adviser to the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee in 2014 and appointed vice chair of the Democratic Conference in 2017. She went on to oppose a number of President Donald Trump's executive orders and nominees, particularly Senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general and Betsy DeVos as secretary of education, both of whom were confirmed. In November 2018, Warren was reelected to the Senate for a second term. She continued to push for progressive plans, including enacting an ultra-millionaire tax to support universal child care, student debt relief, and other initiatives.

On February 9, 2019, Warren announced her bid for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential election. Her progressive platform included free college tuition, universal health care and child care, and higher taxes on banks, corporations, and the ultra-wealthy, among many other plans. Warren briefly became the frontrunner in the fall of 2019, but after low results in the Iowa caucuses and early primaries, she ended her campaign on March 5, 2020. On April 15, Warren endorsed former vice president Joe Biden, a moderate, rather than progressive rival Senator Bernie Sanders for the party nomination.

After Biden was inaugurated in 2021, Warren was considered by the president for the post of secretary of the US Treasury but ultimately was not chosen. She continued to be outspoken on matters such as the 2021 storming of the US Capitol and the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in 2022, both of which she was vehemently opposed to. She published a memoir titled Persist in 2021. Warren cowrote an article with Republican Lindsey Graham that was published in the New York Times on September 6, 2023. In the article, she and Graham accused big tech companies, such as Google and Amazon, of not doing enough to prevent users from being preyed upon by criminals.

Warren ran for a third term in the US Senate in 2024, facing off against Republican John Deaton. She emerged victorious and was reelected in November 2024.

Bibliography

Andrews, Suzanna. "'The Woman Who Knew Too Much."' Vanity Fair. Condé Nast Digital, Nov. 2011. Web. 19 Dec. 2011.

"Elizabeth Warren Discusses Her Book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke." All Things Considered, NPR, 8 Sept. 2003. Web. 19 Dec. 2011.

Goldmacher, Shane, and Astead W. Herndon. “Elizabeth Warren, Once a Front-Runner, Drops Out of Presidential Race.” The New York Times, 10 Mar. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-drops-out.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Graham, Lindsey, and Elizabeth Warren. "When It Comes to Big Tech, Enough Is Enough." The New York Times, 27 July 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/opinion/lindsey-graham-elizabeth-warren-big-tech-regulation.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Krugman, Paul. "'The War on Warren."' New York Times. New York Times, 20 Mar. 2011. Web. 19 Dec. 2011.

Merrilees, Annika, et al. “Elizabeth Warren: Everything You Need to Know about the 2020 Presidential Candidate.” ABC News, ABC News Internet Ventures, 5 Mar. 2020, abcnews.go.com/Politics/elizabeth-warren-senator-massachusetts/story?id=60522652. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Nocera, Joe. "'The Travails of Ms. Warren."' New York Times. New York Times, 22 July 2011. Web. 19 Dec. 2011.

Warren, Elizabeth. "'Unsafe at Any Rate."' Democracy. Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Summer 2007. Web. 19 Dec. 2011.

Warren, Elizabeth, and Tina Smith. "Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith: We've Seen What Will Happen Next to America's Women." 25 June 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/06/25/opinion/elizabeth-warren-tina-smith-abortion-roe.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.