Elizabeth Warren doesn’t like to talk about it, but for years she was a free-market conservative registered with the GOP
“Fight.” It’s the signature word of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s short but consequential political career.This Fight Is Our Fight
“I was just never very political,” is how Warren explains her Republican years. “I just never thought much about the political end.” “Liz was sometimes surprisingly anti-consumer in her attitude,” says law professor Calvin Johnson, a colleague of Warren’s at the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1980s, who was also her neighbor and carpooled with Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann.
Warren herself says that in her early academic work she was merely following the dominant theory of the time, which emphasized the efficiency of free markets and unrestrained businesses, rather than holding strong conservative beliefs herself. Still, she acknowledged in our interview that she underwent a profound change in how she viewed public policy early in her academic career, describing the experience as “worse than disillusionment” and “like being shocked at a deep-down level.
being moderately conservative to being moderately liberal,” says Warren’s co-author and longtime collaborator Jay Westbrook. “When you look at consumer debt and what happens to consumers in America, you begin to think the capitalist machine is out of line.” Warren’s ideological and political transformations also occurred well before she entertained running for public office—lending them an authenticity often lacking in politicians who change their policy positions out of self-interest.
Colleagues from her early years as a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin recall Warren, second from left, as “surprisingly anti-consumer” and “believing much of what the corporate folks say about how the free markets work.” | Tarlton Law Library Digital Collections In a 1980 paper she wrote at the University of Houston, Warren argued that utility companies were over-regulated, and described the arguments of consumer advocates on the other side of the debate as “fallacious” and based on “unscrutinized, long-accepted conventional wisdom.” | Notre Dame Law Review via HeinOnline
cited in cases before the Ohio and Louisiana state Supreme Courts. The Texas Court of Appeals cited the paper approvingly in 2006. By her own admission, Warren was the skeptic on the team. “I set out the prove [the people filing for bankruptcy] were all a bunch of cheaters,” she recounted in 2007 in anon University of California Television. “My take on this, my thrust, what I was going to do is I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us by hauling off to bankruptcy and just charging debts that they really could repay, or who’d been irresponsible in running up debts.
In 1994, on a lark, Virgil Cooper decided to run in the Democratic primary against an Oklahoma congressional incumbent, Representative Mike Synar. Cooper raised almost no money and said his political idol was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. But Synar had become a top target for the National Rifle Association, which poured money into the primary. Cooper won.
“Warren went above and beyond to ensure broad public inclusion,” says Melissa Jacoby, one of the staff attorneys on the commission who is now a law professor at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The 2005 bill, Westbrook says, “got her even further into the political process, and she realized that people in the Republican Party didn’t share her views on policy.”
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