Democrats aren’t good at thinking on their feet. But now it’s just getting sad.
Because Elizabeth Warren completely shut down after she was asked this simple question.
WARREN’S GLASS JAW: CNBC HOST ASKS ONE FAIR QUESTION AND THE SENATOR LOSES IT
There is a certain kind of politician who can dish out criticism by the bucketful but cannot stand the faintest whiff of it in return. Sen. Elizabeth Warren proved once again this week that she belongs firmly in that category — and she did it on friendly territory, which makes the meltdown all the more revealing.
At issue was Warren’s scorched-earth performance at the Senate confirmation hearing for Kevin Warsh, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve. Warren, the ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, went after Warsh with characteristic aggression, declaring him “uniquely ill-suited for the job as Fed chair” and branding him a potential “sock puppet” for the president. It was a hearing-room performance designed for maximum media attention.
She got attention, all right — just not the kind she planned.
THE QUESTION WARREN COULDN’T HANDLE
When Warren took her grievances to CNBC, host Sara Eisen did something simple and entirely reasonable: she noted that Warren herself has been publicly outspoken about what she wants from the Federal Reserve, that she had previously advocated for nominees Lael Brainard and Janet Yellen based on her own policy preferences, and that this pattern is perhaps not entirely different from a president expressing what he wants in a Fed chair.
“I mean, you yourself have been very outspoken on this show and otherwise on what the Fed should be doing,” Eisen said. “You also advocated for Lael Brainard and Janet Yellen, who you were aligned with on policy views. I mean that this is — this isn’t that different, you know, with the president expressing what he wants in terms of policy and who he wants.”
Warren’s response was immediate and incandescent. “I’m sorry. Is that real?” she demanded. “It is not different to just say, ‘Here’s my opinion and here’s how I read the numbers’ and ‘Here’s who I think has a good track record?’ You think that’s the same as being the President of the United States and employing the Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against someone, sending someone a notice that they have been fired?”
She then declared: “Donald Trump is not expressing an opinion. Donald Trump is trying to control the Fed. You know it and I know it.”
THE DOUBLE STANDARD ON FULL DISPLAY
Warren’s outrage would carry more weight if it were not so transparently self-serving. For years, she has arguably done more than any sitting senator to publicly pressure the Federal Reserve into specific policy positions — interest rate decisions, regulatory frameworks, supervisory philosophy. She has used her platform on Senate committees, on television, and in the press to hammer Fed chairs who do not share her economic worldview. She championed Brainard and Yellen precisely because they aligned with her ideological preferences for the central bank. That is, by any reasonable definition, attempting to influence who runs the Fed and how they run it.
Eisen’s comparison was not a partisan attack. It was an observation about consistency. And Warren’s furious response — “Is that real?” — was not a rebuttal. It was a politician who has spent decades building a public brand around demanding accountability from powerful institutions suddenly discovering, the moment accountability is turned in her direction, that comparisons are outrageous and the questioner must simply not understand.
What Warren described as the essential difference — that Trump allegedly uses government power while she merely “expresses opinions” — may be a legitimate legal distinction. But it is not the distinction Eisen was drawing, and Warren knew it. The senator was responding to a question about tone and consistency by reframing it as a question about legal conduct. That is not an answer. It is a change of subject.
Warren’s testimony about what she was looking for in Warsh was, in her own words, that she needed a Fed chair “who can actually assert reality.” If that standard applies to Kevin Warsh, it might reasonably apply to the senator as well.
