Warren’s speech amounts to a review of President Joe Biden’s first two years in office, a tenure she argues could have been more successful without the small number of Democratic senators ― an allusion to Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona ― who refused to eliminate the Senate’s 60-vote supermajority requirement and held up the president’s agenda.
“A few Democrats blocked much of the president’s agenda for working families,” Warren will say. “They torpedoed the president’s plan to reverse the Trump tax giveaways. They blocked proposals to cut skyrocketing housing and child care costs. They thwarted efforts to fight corruption, end gerrymandering, defend democracy and protect abortion rights.”
She plans to lavish praise on Biden, her one-time 2020 presidential primary rival, for defying “the predictions of Washington insiders, lobbyists, and pundits” and “presid[ing] over the best midterm elections for the party in power in 20 years.”
“The president made smart personnel choices,” Warren will say, returning to one of her favorite themes: the need to staff government with progressives. “Instead of surrounding himself with an economic team that believed that government’s principal job was to deliver an economy that benefitted big banks, well-heeled corporations and the fancy lobbyists who strut around Washington like they own the place, Joe Biden picked advisers and regulators who understood that the goal of his Administration was to deliver for working families.”
“When they couldn’t tarnish the Biden economic agenda from Congress, Powell was their best shot to do it from the Fed ― and make no mistake, they nearly succeeded in causing enough economic harm to win big last week,” Warren will say, adding: “The president offered the Powell nomination as an olive branch to Republicans. The Republican response was to break the branch in half, set it on fire, and then spend hundreds of millions of dollars attacking the president for Powell’s interest rate decisions, arguing that Biden is responsible for families’ pain.”
The Massachusetts senator will also reiterate her call for Congress to pass legislation lifting the debt ceiling in the lame duck, arguing Democrats will pay little political price for doing so and Republicans will try to sabotage the economy if they do not.
“Republicans will eagerly sow economic chaos so they can turn around and blame Democrats for economic chaos ― all in service to moving Donald Trump a few inches closer to the White House,” Warren’s speech reads. “If Democrats let ourselves be bullied by Republican hostage-taking, we will hurt the families we came here to help. And, for good measure, we’ll be voted out of office in 2024.”
