You enabled this fake account scam,
you got rich off it, and then you tried to cover it up.
At best, you were incompetent.
At worst, you were complicit.
And either way, you should be fired.
- [Julia] That's Elizabeth Warren,
a US Senator, a CEO's worst nightmare,
and a 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful
who has a very real chance
of becoming the nation's first-ever female president.
- You would be the oldest president ever inaugurated.
- I'd also be the youngest woman ever inaugurated.
(audience cheering)
- [Julia] She's playing a major role
in advancing a progressive leftist agenda
in American politics, but she wasn't always.
Years before she became a politician,
she was a registered Republican.
By now you're probably wondering,
who's telling me all this, and why?
I'm comedian Julia Shiplett,
and this is the story of Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Ann Warren grew up, as she likes to say,
on the ragged edge of the middle class.
She was born in 1949 in Norman, Oklahoma.
According to Politico, Katrina Harry,
one of Warren's best friends in high school,
distinctly remembers Warren being an ice-cold Republican,
as she would sometimes tease her.
Warren joked backed that Harry had socialist friends.
Warren got a debate scholarship
to George Washington University.
She dropped out to marry her high school sweetheart.
They initially moved to Houston,
where Warren finished her undergraduate studies.
The couple then moved to New Jersey.
She became pregnant and had their first child.
Then she enrolled in Rutgers Law.
Warren had her second child shortly
before graduating with her law degree.
- I took to law school like a pig takes to mud.
I mean this was fabulous.
I loved law school.
- [Julia] In the next few years,
Warren passed the bar, got divorced
and remarried to her current husband,
worked on real estate closings,
and raised her two kids.
And then an important call came in.
- Rutgers called and said,
"Somebody didn't show up to teach a class.
"Would you like to come and teach it?"
- [Julia] As a professor in the '80s,
she was traveling around the country with a photocopier,
working on a big study examining bankruptcy,
who files for it and why it happens.
She set out to prove that people were robbing the system.
- I set out to prove they're all a bunch of cheaters.
My take on this, my thrust, what I was gonna do,
is I was gonna expose these people
who were taking advantage of the rest of us
by hauling off to bankruptcy and discharging debts,
that they really could repay it.
- [Julia] But she found just the opposite,
that abuse of bankruptcy was rare
and people filing for it were
actually in financial distress.
This important finding led her
to do what hardly any other politician
or person really ever does, change her mind.
In 1992 she became a law professor at Harvard
and later got a call from Washington.
One of her old high school debate buddies was hired
by the Clinton administration
to study the country's bankruptcy laws,
and he decided to call Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren.
She said, "We hadn't seen each other
"in the intervening decades,
"but 14-year-old boys seem to remember 15-year-old girls
"who once beat them in debate tournament play."
Warren, who was brought on to make changes
to the bankruptcy bill, quickly became cynical
with the political landscape and switched parties in 1996.
It's unclear why her party's handling
of the 1980s AIDS crisis
or the racist Southern Strategy wasn't
enough for her to jump ship,
but nevertheless bankruptcy law was.
As a Democrat, Warren was called on by Washington again.
During the 2008 financial crisis
she was asked to lead a congressional oversight panel,
which was convened to review the current state
of financial markets and the regulatory system.
- Two seeks ago I became the chair
of the congressional oversight panel,
established to check out how $700 billion
of your money is spent in Washington.
- [Julia] Because the committee had very little power,
Warren decided to try
and win over the court of public opinion,
so she frequently popped up on TV and made her case.
- And so what we're really watching
here is a David and Goliath story.
- [Julia] She went to bat for the American people
against both the Bush and Obama administrations,
questioning them about why the government was
more interested in bailing out the banks
than helping homeowners facing foreclosure.
Her work on the panel led to the creation
of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
which is a US government agency tasked
with ensuring financial products
and services work for, and not prey on, the American people.
Warren won a Senate seat in 2012,
representing Massachusetts,
where she's doggedly fought
for the American people ever since.
- This is about responsibility.
Have you returned one nickel of the millions
of dollars that you were paid while this scam was going on?
- The board will take care of that.
- Have you returned one nickel
of the money you earned while this scam was going on?
- And the board will do--
- [Warren] I will take that as a no, then.
- [Julia] Warren has been one of the loudest voices
in the Senate holding the rich accountable.
But she has also done some things
in her past that many are critical of.
For example, in 1986 Warren claimed
she was American Indian when she filled
out paperwork for the State Bar of Texas.
In 2019 Warren released DNA results showing
she had a Native American ancestor six
to 10 generations ago.
Critics argue the distant ancestors make
her unable to claim the identity.
Warren apologized.
And in 2017 she voted to raise the defense budget
to $700 billion,
far surpassing the $54 billion increase requested by Trump.
She championed Israel's war on Gaza
and supported sanctions against Venezuela.
But all-in-all she's largely seen as one of the
most progressive US senators America has ever seen.
On February 9th, 2019, Warren formally announced
her bid for the presidency.
Throughout the debates Warren was
frequently seen side-by-side with Senator Bernie Sanders
as they both bashed private insurance companies,
and the rich, and sometimes Joe Biden.
The two candidates are often compared to one another,
and of course they overlap,
but denying that there are differences
between them is inaccurate.
When Donald Trump, at the State of the Union,
said that America would never be a socialist country,
Warren stood up and applauded.
At first Warren adopted the Vermont Senator's
Medicare for All bill.
- I'm with Bernie on Medicare for All.
- [Julia] But she later pivoted
to breaking his bill into two parts.
The first part is passing the legislation
to offer new Medicare benefits
while maintaining private insurance companies.
The second part is proposing legislation
to end existing employer plans
by her third year in office,
similar to plans put forward
by Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg.
Proponents of her more moderate healthcare plan call
it realistic, citing all the roadblocks
up against ambitious bills already in Congress.
Opponents argue that achieving Medicare for All
over the course of two bills is dangerous
because it makes the legislation
potentially more vulnerable to not passing,
and, they claim, by kicking the program off
with an immediate compromise,
it leaves her no wiggle room to complete the full transition
to Medicare for All.
Warren calls her proposal a long-term plan, which,
according to left wing political analyst Ben Studebaker,
is code to rich people for, "This is all pretend."
But much like Senator Sanders,
Warren hasn't taken a dime of big money
during the 2020 presidential primaries.
However, she's transferred at least $10.4 million
from past fundraiser with millionaires
and billionaires to her 2020 presidential primary run.
And the guy who knows more about taking big money
than anyone else called her out.
- Senator, your presidential campaign right now,
as we speak, is funded in part by money you transferred,
having raised it at those exact same big-ticket fundraisers
you now denounce.
- [Julia] Warren's recent shift of shooing big money away
during the primaries has critics fearful
that this is just a strategic move
and not a deeply held belief.
They argue she's trying to keep up with Bernie Sanders
and appease the immense Democratic-Socialist shift
in the party before taking big money
again in the general to compete with Trump.
In fact, Warren confirmed this fear.
- Does this only apply in the primaries,
or will you carry this over to the general election
or any other election you'll have going forward?
- So this is for primaries.
Look, I do not believe in unilateral disarmament.
We need to win.
- [Julia] It's a fair argument,
doing whatever it takes to win.
After all, isn't that politics?
The flip side, however, raises the question,
is winning an elected office at
all costs worth the countless political favors
one will have to fulfill during their term?
For Warren, at least in the primaries, the answer is no.
- I decided I was not gonna spend
my time behind closed doors with bazillionaires
and corporate executives.
- [Julia] It's unclear what an ever-evolving
Elizabeth Warren would look like in the general election,
but if she gets the chance,
this one-time Harvard professor
with tons of government experience
and a finger on the pulse of the political landscape might
just beat a former steak salesman.
(upbeat jazz music)
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