WASHINGTON, DC — Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a potential candidate for the 2020 presidential election, took on a populist tone in her speech at the Center for American Progress 2017 Ideas Conference on Tuesday as she called for the rooting out of money’s influence in politics and continued her resistance against President Donald Trump.
“We believe in equal justice under the law, and we’re ready to fight for it,” Warren said. “We believe in an economy that doesn’t just work for the super-rich, but works for everyone.”
“Concentrated money and concentrated power are corrupting our democracy and becoming dangerously worse with Donald Trump in the White House,” Warren said. The former bankruptcy law professor did not mince words on the topic of finances as she stated her intention to pass legislation that would require presidents to disclose their tax returns.
Warren, who helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, also said she thought it would be beneficial to pass “my Presidential Conflicts of Interests Act, which would require presidents and vice presidents to put their assets in a blind trust during their years of public service.”
Later in her speech, she said:
Money slithers through Washington like a snake. And I’m not simply talking about giant bags of money and cash exchanging hands in dark alleys. I’m talking about perfectly legal ways that the super-rich and giant corporations use their cash and influence to rig the system and get the government to favor their interests over the interests of the people.
Additionally, Warren suggested publicly funded elections, and she called for the Supreme Court to “overturn its terrible Citizens United mistake.” Trump spent nearly $70 million financing his own campaign.
“Money is already causing a deep rot in Washington,” she said. “And that is why it is time for systemic change. We can start that change with the way that political campaigns are financed.”
In addition to pushing her progressive platform, Warren did not miss the opportunity to press fake news from her pulpit on Tuesday in suggesting that Trump’s temporary, 90-day visa ban was a “Muslim ban.”
The temporary ban does not include countries with the top ten Muslim populations: Turkey (71 million), Algeria (35 million), and Morocco (32 million). It also does not include Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Warren also suggested that Trump has not only failed to “drain the swamp,” but said that the “swamp is bigger, deeper, uglier, and filled with more corrupt creatures than ever before in history,” referring to the president’s cabinet picks.
In her closing remarks, Warren said, “Now is the time to remind him that our intelligence secrets are not gossip and that his personal desire to impress his Russian buddies does not outweigh the safety or security of our allies”:
Now is the time to remind him that in this country nobody is above the law, including the President of the United States. It is time to resist. It is time to fight back. And it is time to be clear what we believe: that no foreign power, and especially not Russia, gets to launch an assault on our democracy without any investigation or any consequences.
…
I have news for Donald Trump: No matter how much he might admire Vladimir Putin’s Russia, we will never accept autocracy. Here in America, we will embrace and defend democracy. And we do that by demanding everyone in our government is accountable — even the President of the United States.
Senators Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) also spoke. Other speakers included Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and the Gold Star father of Capt. Humayun Khan, Khizr Khan, who told Trump in his speech that his offer for the president to read the Constitution still stands.
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