Who Is Elizabeth Warren?

Following the death of Antonin Scalia, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren was among those who most emphatically denounced Mitch McConnell’s suggestion that the GOP might resolve to block the confirmation of President Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee—so as to reserve the task of making that nomination for whomever the voters elect as president in November. Said Warren: “Senator McConnell is right that the American people should have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court justice. In fact, they did—when President Obama won the 2012 election by five million votes. Article II Section 2 of the Constitution says the President of the United States nominates [J]ustices to the Supreme Court, with the advice and consent of the Senate…. Senate Republicans took an oath just like Senate Democrats did. Abandoning the duties they swore to uphold would threaten both the Constitution and our democracy itself. It would also prove that all the Republican talk about loving the Constitution is just that—empty talk.”

Moreover, Warren herself has garnered some support as a possible successor to Scalia. Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson, for one, has directly implored President Obama to appoint Warren to the Court “before the end of this week,” which “would make it a ‘recess appointment’” and thereby enable Warren to “take office immediately.” According to Grayson, Warren “deserves” to be appointed because she has produced “scholarly work [that] is renowned”; has been “an indefatigable watchdog over the capital markets for almost a decade”; and is “an outstanding writer and communicator.”

So who, exactly, is Elizabeth Warren?

Prior to becoming a U.S. Senator in 2012, Warren spent twenty years as a professor at Harvard Law School. From the mid-Eighties through the late Nineties, she deliberately misrepresented herself as a “minority professor” of “Native American” heritage. This falsehood was to Warren’s great professional advantage at that time, as Harvard was under heavy pressure to add more nonwhites and women to its faculty. During her 2012 Senate campaign, Warren’s deceptions came back to haunt her when it became obvious that she had been lying about her background for decades. In response to media questions about the matter, the strongest explanation she was able to provide was that she had always viewed the “high cheekbones” of her late “papaw” (grandfather) as solid evidence of her Native American lineage. Warren’s genetic arithmetic said otherwise, however. Even by the most generous interpretation of the facts, she is no more than ¹⁄₃₂ Cherokee.

Warren’s racial obsessions were likewise on display in March 2004, when she spoke at a Virginia symposium entitled “Critical Race Theory: The Next Frontier,” alongside a number of academics who, according to the Washington Free Beacon, “have advocated for corporate and government reparations for African-Americans, criticized the concept of U.S. citizenship, and accused the United States of operating under a system of ‘apartheid.‘” Critical Race Theory, founded by the late Derrick Bell, is an academic discipline which maintains that society is fundamentally divided along racial lines into (white) oppressors and (black) victims, similar to the way Marxism frames the oppressor/victim dichotomy along class lines.

In an article which she published soon after that symposium, Warren lamented “how black families are having much greater difficulty accumulating wealth” because “tax codes or other seemingly neutral statutes systematically disadvantage black families.” Giving voice to her core belief that no one is ever really responsible for their own successes or failures in life, Warren said nothing about the fact that the rate of out-of-wedlock births—which in the black community exceeded 70 percent—was (and still is) by far the strongest predictor of poverty, regardless of one’s race or ethnicity.

Warren’s other big obsession is her unabashed contempt for free-market capitalism, contrasted to her devout faith in big-government redistributionism as the cure for all that ails mankind. In 2003 Warren and her daughter, Amelia Tyagi, co-authored a book titled The Two-Income Trap, wherein they portray capitalism as a financial system where “the game is stacked against” ordinary people by greedy exploiters. A few years later, Warren argued that the cataclysmic subprime mortgage crisis was caused by the devious tactics of capitalist “lenders [who] have deliberately built tricks and traps into some credit products so they can ensnare families in a cycle of high-cost debt.” Her solution? More “regulation” by the very same federal government that—though Warren didn’t mention it—had literally forced banks, on pain of severe penalties, to make countless loans to underqualified nonwhite borrowers—all under the noble flags of “racial justice” and “inclusion.”

Speaking of “inclusion,” Warren also served a stint with the FDIC’s Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion (ACEI), which focuses on “expanding access to banking services” and “promot[ing] asset accumulation” for “underserved populations”—essentially the same goals that had created the financial crisis in the first place. Having apparently learned nothing from the calamity of 2008, the ACEI, echoing Warren, advances the false notion that the meltdown was the result of insufficient government “oversight” of lending institutions; “predatory” lending practices by private-sector banks; and all manner of “deception” and “discrimination” directed against poor, unsuspecting cherubs seeking mortgage loans. By Warren’s telling, capitalism had shown itself to be “a financial system that saw [people] not as customers, but as prey … a financial system … devastated by mindless deregulation and unchecked greed.”

In 2009 Warren appeared in Michael Moore’s anti-capitalist film titled Capitalism: A Love Story, wherein the filmmaker told Warren, on screen, that “capitalism in and of itself, at least the capitalism we know now, is immoral, it’s not democratic, and worst of all, it doesn’t work.” “We have to rewrite [capitalism’s] rules,” Warren said in agreement, blasting corporations for trying to “sell [people] more credit cards that are loaded with tricks and traps.”

In 2011 Warren famously asserted that the government and the public sector must play a vital role if wealth creation is to occur: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own—nobody…. You built a factory out there?… You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.” That fall, Warren—while enjoying a $429,000 Harvard salary and residing in a $5 million mansion—expressed support for the anti-capitalism rallies of Occupy Wall Street. “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” she boasted to an interviewer. “I support what they do.”

Elizabeth Warren is all about big government. All about a centralized economy. All about wealth redistribution. All about class warfare. All about picking relentlessly at society’s racial scabs. All about fundamental transformation. It would be difficult to think of a more appropriate individual for Barack Obama to nominate to the Supreme Court.