By Rick Manning — The professional left is all a-Twitter with the thought that Harvard Law professor and former Obama Administration banking oversight official Elizabeth Warren is seeking the Democratic Party nomination to take on U.S. Senator Scott Brown in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Warren has even become the darling of the Occupy movement with an old video going viral on the iPads of the denizens of the squalid urban campgrounds stating many sentiments which many Americans across the political spectrum agree, until you get to the part about what should be done about it.
The love fest between the Occupy protesters and Warren is not unrequited as candidate Warren recently embraced them in a candidate forum saying, “The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago, and there has been no real accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it.”
Now, the Beacon Hill candidate is attempting to broaden her appeal beyond the blue bloods and urban campers to real people saying she’s “going for the hick vote”.
What a strange statement from someone who is so in tune with the non-offensive language of the politically correct.
The term “hick” is defined as meaning, “an offensive term that deliberately insults somebody’s rural residence or background and his or her intelligence and level of sophistication (slang insult).” The adjective definition of the term is no less snobbish, “rural, rustic, and unsophisticated: remote from big cities and regarded as lacking in sophistication.”
It hardly seems like a wise move for Warren to define the very voters who she needs to win election in pejorative terms.
Of course, contextually, she probably didn’t mean the term in that manner as it was in reference to her own upbringing in a solidly conservative Oklahoma, a part of America that has been derisively called a “flyover” state by the coastal left.
Voters outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts might be surprised to learn that they are part of the great unwashed, who are too unsophisticated to keep up with the issues that nanny state elites like Warren want to expand government to solve.
For instance, imagine what the great unwashed would say if they were to learn that government itself through the Federal Housing Administration and its Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were wholly responsible for forcing mortgage bankers to make loans to those who had no hope of ever repaying them?
The “hicks” of Massachusetts just might want to hold those responsible for creating laws and regulations that not only forced banks to make loans that they knew would go bad, but also then bailed out those very banks and through the Dodd-Frank legislation, permanently instituted a “too big to fail” fund.
Perhaps, Elizabeth Warren is secretly hoping that Massachusetts’ “hicks” will perp-walk Barney Frank to the nearest penitentiary and hold him accountable, since he was a leading voice for bailouts and the very policies that led to their inevitability?
But to get a real insight into government Elizabeth Warren style, one only has to look at the agency that was established due to her cajoling and influence — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB.) It is not hyperbolic to call the CFPB Elizabeth Warren’s baby as publications as diverse as the extremist left Mother Jones to the Wall Street Journal have credited her with being a prime player in its creation.
After a heated battle over Warren’s potentially running the new agency, she was disappointed when the President chose someone else to direct the agency that she played a large role in birthing.
Warren’s vision for government is revealed in the powers given this agency and most importantly, it’s insulation from the very voters she seeks to now represent. Warren’s CFPB Director wields immense power with virtually no checks in place as the law provides:
- Consolidated power in the hands of one person (the CFPB is being run by a single director, rather than the typical board of appointees with differing viewpoints and the opportunity to provide dissent.)
- The CFPB’s director will be confirmed for a five-year term placing him or her outside the presidential election cycle.
- The CFPB’s director can only be removed by the President for cause.
- The CFPB’s budget is not appropriated by Congress, eliminating all effective congressional oversight over this banking czarina, and eliminating all accountability to the people.
- The federal courts are forbidden from reviewing the rules issued by the CFPB’s putting the agency above the nation’s court system.
What we learn is that Elizabeth Warren’s vision for government involves giving one unelected person more power than even the President of the United States to make rules that govern the banking and financial services sectors.
In Elizabeth Warren’s world vision, the Supreme Court cannot declare her rules unconstitutional.
Elizabeth Warren’s ideal is that the people’s elected representatives cannot step in and overturn her actions, and even the President of the United States can be ignored by the all-powerful director of this new agency.
Now, Elizabeth Warren wants those very “hicks” who she distrusts so deeply that the agency she constructed is built to avoid any accountability to them to elect her to the U.S. Senate.
Out in “hick” America, there is an old saying, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” It will be interesting to see if the people of Massachusetts will be fooled into granting Elizabeth Warren a seat in the Senate after learning of her disdain for their votes and the very Constitution that guarantees them.
Rick Manning is the Communications Director of Americans for Limited Government. You can follow him on Twitter at @RManning957.
