CHAPTER 18

ELIZABETH WARREN

Persistent

LAST WEEK MY Elizabeth Warren tribute T-shirt arrived: “Nevertheless, She Persisted” emblazoned on the front. It’s one of the great things about the digital age: Someone, somewhere makes an incendiary remark, and an hour later the phrase appears on mugs, stickers, lawn signs, baseball caps, and fitted tees. I ordered mine in February 2017, about seven seconds after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell muzzled Elizabeth for violating Rule 19 during the confirmation hearings for Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

What, you may ask, is Rule 19? Technically, a little-used conduct rule employed to prevent senators from “impugning” one another. In this case, a little-used rule employed to get Elizabeth Warren to shut the hell up.^*1 At least McConnell went to the effort of pretending there was an official reason for interrupting Elizabeth; mere months later when California Democrat Kamala Harris questioned Sessions before the Senate Intelligence Committee (that guy gets around), she was interrupted twice during the handful of minutes she had the floor. This time the unstated reason was: You’re a woman and you’re being annoying by being articulate and assertive.^*2

Elizabeth, the pugnacious junior senator from Massachusetts, had been reading a 1986 letter, written by Coretta Scott King, in opposition to the nomination of then Judge Sessions to the federal bench in Alabama. The nine-page letter doesn’t have many flattering things to say about Sessions when it comes to his attitudes about voter equality. McConnell told Elizabeth to stop, but she kept right on going, forcing McConnell to proclaim, in an exasperated, superior tone: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

(McConnell’s tone was so familiar. It was patronizing, but also reminded me of how I address the dog when I discover that yet again she has gotten into the recycling, strewing scrap paper and take-out containers around the house. It’s a daily occurrence, and really, by this time the dog should know better.) Does it go without saying that women who keep talking after they’re “warned” are difficult? I’m saying it anyway.

Sessions was easily confirmed by the Republican majority, but the kerfuffle in the press caused King’s letter to go viral. Millions of people who would otherwise never have paid attention wound up reading the letter online, and Elizabeth’s Facebook Live reading of the letter received six million views. When Trevor Noah of the Daily Show asked if she’d realized in the moment how much McConnell had inadvertently helped her cause, Elizabeth dodged the question, as she often does. “What it’s done is to help us have a better democratic conversation,” she observed diplomatically.

Elizabeth Warren had never planned on becoming a politician, but here she is, kicking ass and taking names. Mother of two, grandmother of three, former Harvard law professor, she is the author of 11 books, including the 2017 best seller, This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class. She’s also one of those intensely charismatic public speakers who makes you want to go out and join up.

ELIZABETH HERRING was born in 1949 and grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. Her father sold carpet at Montgomery Ward and her mother stayed home and took care of Elizabeth and her three older brothers. They were a typical, post–World War II middle-class family; as long as nothing bad happened, they got by. Crossed fingers are not and have never been a safety net, and when Elizabeth was 12, her father had a heart attack. After he recovered, his old job had been filled. The medical bills piled up. The family station wagon was repossessed. Elizabeth’s mother, wearing her one nice dress, interviewed for a job answering phones at Sears. It paid minimum wage, but it kept the family afloat. Elizabeth babysat, waitressed, sold hand-sewn dresses, and even bred the neighbor’s elegant black poodle to her own dog and sold the puppies. The experience forced her to grow up there and then: She realized a person could work as hard as she possibly could and still never get ahead.

Elizabeth’s brothers went into the military; she was expected to find a husband. When she mentioned college, her mother said that money aside (they didn’t have any), a college education would make her less marriageable. I have no doubt her mother said this out of love, but it’s a good thing Elizabeth (then as now) persisted. She pretended to listen but went to the library and began researching colleges, and secretly sent away for admission packets.

Anyone who’s watched five minutes of Elizabeth on C-SPAN or read a day’s worth of her tweets won’t be surprised to learn that she was the star debater on her high school team. After being named “Oklahoma’s Top High School Debater,” she won a full debate scholarship (who knew that was a thing?) to George Washington University in 1965.

Culture shock followed on the heels of her arrival at Foggy Bottom. As she writes in her memoir, A Fighting Chance: “I had never been north or east of Pryor, Oklahoma. I had never seen a ballet, never been to a museum, never ridden in a taxi.” After two years, she reconnected with Jim Warren, her old high school boyfriend; when he proposed, she said yes and promptly dropped out of college.

In 1968, not every young person was turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” may have been blasting out of every car radio (see Chapter 27), but for a small-town Oklahoma girl like Elizabeth, chucking your scholarship to a prestigious university to marry literally the first guy who asked was a sensible move.

Jim Warren was an upstanding engineer. When he landed a job at NASA, the couple moved to Houston. For someone else, this might have been the Happily Ever After. But Elizabeth had a sharp, active mind and still wanted to finish college. After enrolling in the University of Houston, she graduated in 1970 with a bachelor of science degree in speech pathology. They moved to New Jersey soon afterward—again for Jim’s job. Elizabeth dutifully got pregnant, but after the baby was born, she simply wasn’t content to stay home. On some level, she knew that motherhood is not a one-size-fits-all situation. She loved her baby but was also a smart, ambitious young woman who longed to make her mark.

Elizabeth applied for and was accepted into Rutgers Law School. Difficult woman–style, she accepted her feelings of guilt and marched on anyway. After she graduated in 1978, she began lecturing at Rutgers. Then, when Jim was transferred back to Texas, she found a similar position at the University of Houston.

The law is lousy with women these days, but when Elizabeth began lecturing at the UH Law Center, she was “mistaken for a secretary, a student, the wife of a student, a lost undergrad who had wandered into the law school by mistake, and a nurse (blood drive day).” But she was too exhilarated by her life to get waylaid by stupid sexism. She had a husband, a pair of healthy, beautiful kids, and a challenging and fulfilling career. Without knowing it, Elizabeth was a Having It All trailblazer.

Her husband never complained, but it was clear as the years passed that having a working wife wasn’t what he’d signed on for. Even though she continued to do it all, when dinner was late, he would pointedly look at his watch. In 1978, they divorced amicably. Two years later, in a match that reflected her academic passions, she married law professor and legal historian Bruce Mann, who presumably does not look pointedly at his watch under any circumstances.

IN THE 1980S AND ’90S, Elizabeth became an expert in bankruptcy law. It was an arcane (boring) field in which legal scholars and change makers had little interest. Common wisdom held that only deadbeats who blew their paychecks on blow, strippers, and muscle cars were forced to declare bankruptcy. Elizabeth had other ideas, formed in her childhood, that made her think maybe things weren’t always that cut and dried. She launched an investigation into who, exactly, benefited from bankruptcy protection laws. She and her team interviewed bankruptcy court judges, attorneys, and debtors to discover, lo and behold, that many people who went bankrupt had jobs, sometimes two, and tried to pay their bills on time. She proved what we know today to be true: People in the middle class are all one job loss, divorce, or catastrophic illness away from bankruptcy.

In 1995, Elizabeth took a position lecturing at Harvard Law. The same year she advised the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, working to fight legislation restricting bankruptcy protection for consumers. She wrote extensively about income equality and the threat of predatory lending, long before it was on the national radar. She became the avowed enemy of the protective laws enjoyed by big banks and large financial institutions that allow them to squeeze middle-class families to improve their profit margin.

In the summer of 2007, in an academic journal called Democracy, Elizabeth published a think piece called “Unsafe at Any Rate.” It revealed the danger of subprime mortgages, the coming financial collapse, and the need for government oversight. (The subtitle was: “If it’s good enough for microwaves, it’s good enough for mortgages. Why we need a Financial Product Safety Commission.”) Remarkably, politicos read the piece and saw it as part of the solution to the problem of big banks gone wild. In 2011, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was signed into law. “Nobody’s responsible to the American consumer, no one’s looking out for American families; we started that,” Elizabeth told ABC News.

Let’s stop for a moment and appreciate how rarely this kind of thing actually happens. Scholars are always publishing think pieces and op-eds about solutions to the world’s thorny problems—but mostly they’re writing for each other, and 37 other nerds. The creation of the CFPB is the equivalent of sending an idea for a great feminist anthem to Beyoncé, and then having her record it and sing it at the Super Bowl. Still, the experience wasn’t all high fives and ticker tape parades; then President Obama refused to nominate Elizabeth for the position of director, worried that with her passion for equity and unwillingness to soft-pedal her opinions, she would never win the approval of Republicans.^*3

Elizabeth Warren was crushed. She was down but not out. So in 2012, at the age of 63, she found another way to contribute: She ran for and was elected as the first female senator from Massachusetts, smoking the competition by eight points. Her campaign promise was that she did not intend to go to Washington to be polite and go along to get along.

Her second act is a wonder to behold. She’s got her public style down pat. Blond bob, frameless glasses, minimal makeup. For appearances she usually sports black pants and a bright, stylish jacket. Not quite a pantsuit. More frisky. Maybe because she didn’t intend to be a politician, or maybe once a star debater always a star debater: Either way, she doesn’t seem to see any point in measured speech.

Like Donald Trump, Elizabeth is an ace tweeter (though more articulate, with a larger vocabulary and an ability to spell). During the 2016 election the two went back and forth like a pair of high-profile table tennis champs. After Trump defended his middle-of-the-night rants, Elizabeth observed: “You never tweet at 3am with ways to help students getting crushed by debt or seniors struggling on Social Security.”

Of course, Elizabeth Warren has been called too angry—but my bet is that she doesn’t much care. She is angry. This is what makes a woman difficult: She not only refuses to change her behavior when she is called a name—but she keeps right on doing it, with verve and conviction. If that’s difficult, I’ll have what she’s having.

^*1My own senator from the great state of Oregon, Jeff Merkley, also read a portion of Coretta Scott King’s letter, but no one said boo.

^*2If your blood pressure can take it, check out Susan Chira’s piece in the New York Times, “The Universal Phenomenon of Men Interrupting Women.”

^*3And right he probably was, given that Republicans love Elizabeth Warren only slightly more than they do Hillary Clinton (see Chapter 26).