The senator is taking a victory lap over the conversion of Republican lawmakers to a cause she and her fellow Democrats have long championed.
Elizabeth Warren is having a moment. Yes, another one. Today, however, it’s not progressives or their allies in the press who are shining the spotlight on the technocratic reformer from Massachusetts. It’s Republicans.
This week, Senators Rick Scott and Ted Budd joined Warren in calling on the Defense Department to invest in child-care programs for America’s servicemen and -women. “Today, DoD’s child care program is the largest employer-based child care system in the country,” the lawmakers’ letter to the Pentagon read. But there is more work to be done. “We urge you to prioritize building up the number and capacity of [child developmental centers] and community partners committed to increasing child care supply, and to address low wages that hurt worker hiring and retention, thereby limiting child care availability.”
Warren’s office is taking a victory lap over the conversion of Republican lawmakers to a cause she and her fellow Democrats have long championed. The merits of this bipartisan proposal notwithstanding, getting Republican backing for it goes some way toward ratifying Warren’s long-standing critique of the Pentagon, which she says has skimped on veterans’ services because of “price gouging.” Presumably, the overpayments she accuses the Pentagon of making would only grow as it makes new financial commitments to child-care services.
Warren has also secured the support of Republican senator Lindsey Graham in her effort to rein in and regulate America’s tech sector. Their proposal for a “Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act” would presume to license technology firms participating in the market to “prevent online harm, promote free speech and competition, guard Americans’ privacy and protect national security.” Again, Warren led the way, and Graham has only followed. But as our own Jonathan Nicastro wrote, their proposal would likely have the opposite of its intended effect. “Removing their protection from legal liability is far more likely to contract the window of permitted speech than to expand it.”
Even Ron DeSantis is receiving veiled praise from the press for belatedly coming around to progressivist Warrenism. The Florida governor’s “Declaration of Economic Independence” ratifies Warren’s long-standing advocacy for loosening bankruptcy regulations so as to allow student-loan borrowers to more easily discharge their debts. “While Warren does not agree with DeSantis’ stance against broad debt relief,” Insider reported, “she also has said bankruptcy should be a viable option for borrowers, especially with federal payments set to resume in October after an over three-year pause.” DeSantis’s newfound progressive allies put some meat on the allegation from both populist right-wing and anti-Trump center-left camps, which maintain that the Florida governor is the rough Republican equivalent of the senior senator from Massachusetts.
Those of us old enough to remember a time before faddish nationalist economic prescriptions overtook Republican politics cringe at the rehabilitation of one of the Democratic Party’s most ambitious progressive voices. We’re the ones, we’re so often told, who changed our stripes in the Trump years, subordinating principle and timeless ideological prescriptions to the political demands of the moment. “You’ve changed,” say Elizabeth Warren’s Republican backers. It doesn’t seem that way to me.