No, Elizabeth Warren Is Not a Feminist Icon
Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., was vaulted to high status among feminists.
What did she do? Did she lay down in the street to protect the voting rights of women? Did she take a stand against sex trafficking and female exploitation?
No. She knowingly and flagrantly broke a long-standing rule of the Senate. And for this, the left made her a hero.
The rule that Warren broke was Section 2 of Rule 19 , a century-old prohibition on senators from attributing conduct or motives “unworthy or unbecoming” to another senator.
If applied, it requires the offending senator to “take his (or her) seat,” meaning they cannot speak for the remainder of the debate.
When Warren came to the floor to speak against the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., for attorney general, she embarked on a floor speech that painted Sessions—still her colleague in the Senate—as an unhinged racist.
Several minutes into her remarks , Warren called Sessions “a disgrace to the Justice Department” and stated that “he should withdraw his nomination and resign his position.”
It was this statement—not the reading of the letter from Coretta Scott King, as the media has repeatedly reported—which triggered the chair to warn Warren that she was dangerously close to violating the tenets of Rule 19.
Warren was either unmoved or confused about the rules of the Senate, because she continued to slander Sessions, stating that “he has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens.”
While Warren was referencing a statement from King, she was not quoting from it. (And furthermore, this claim against Sessions has been repeatedly debunked .)
Warren’s wanton and blatant disregard of the Senate’s standing rules is what triggered the application of Rule 19 . Warren promptly appealed, but the Senate, by a vote of 49-43, determined that the rule had been correctly applied.
Meanwhile, the left was at work making a martyr of Warren for her deliberate disregard for the rules of the institution in which she serves. The hashtag #ShePersisted popped up within minutes—a reference to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comment that Warren had been warned, but persisted in violation of the rules.
Feminists on Twitter fomented outrage that Warren had been “silenced,” that she had been shut down by the Senate patriarchy, that this was somehow representative of the struggle of women everywhere to be heard.
For her part, Warren stood outside the Senate chamber, bravely reading the statement that ran afoul of Senate rules, and then promptly called in to MSNBC to claim she’d been “red carded” in the Senate.
The left fell over themselves in martyrdom ecstasy. Such bravery, such courage, such resistance in the face of deep institutional oppression. (Not to be left out, even Hillary Clinton got in on the drama.)
“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
So must we all. https://t.co/JXROGHPNkH
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 8, 2017
The problem here, in case anyone hasn’t noticed yet, is that this “Elizabeth Warren, Feminist Hero, Courageous Victim” narrative is completely misplaced.
The Senate rules are gender-neutral. Explicitly so. Warren knowingly violated them, either because she just doesn’t care, or because she doesn’t know the difference between what’s allowed at a rally and what’s allowed on the Senate floor.
And for that, she’s a feminist icon? Please, spare me.
Raising Warren up as a hero of feminism because she knowingly broke a gender-neutral Senate rule not only belittles the actual achievements of feminist heroes like Alice Paul, Sojourner Truth, Shirley Chisholm, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, it relegates women—again—to the status of victims, which they are most certainly not.
This is the problem with the left’s narrative about women. In seeking to make martyrs out of women like Warren (and Clinton, for that matter), they implicitly sell women on the idea that they are still kept down, still oppressed by the insidious forces of patriarchy in a society that’s set against them.
This isn’t an empowering philosophy. It’s a degrading one.
Women have made incredible strides in the face of tremendous odds. And because we have had true feminist heroes that have triumphed in the face of real oppression, we live in a time where women are Cabinet secretaries, CEOs of major corporations, senators, presidential contenders, leaders in their fields—even outnumbering men at universities.
Why does the left continue to tell women that they are still victims? This shamefully dismisses the accomplishments of women generations over who have sacrificed everything to create a society in which women are promoted for their accomplishments, and recognized for their achievements, rather than their gender.
Do women continue to face difficulties in modern society? Yes. Discrimination, exploitation, and harassment are very real issues faced by women across America, and ones that deserve very real attention.
But does what Warren faced in the Senate rise to that level? No. Profoundly, no.
For the left to equate the two—to make Warren a martyr to a belief that women are somehow still the most victimized class in society—is a shameful attempt to make women believe they still can’t reach the top tiers of society, that they’ll always be fighting some nebulous, unidentified patriarchal conspiracy designed to silence them, instead of pouring their energies into pursuing their dreams.
Warren consciously broke a 100-year-old Senate rule. A true feminist—one who prizes being treated equally regardless of gender—would own up to the issue and accept the consequences like every other member of the Senate, not wave the flag of victimhood in the face of American women who continue to achieve, break barriers, and reach the heights of their potential every single day.
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Elizabeth Warren bought foreclosed to make a quick buck.
Before the crash that she blamed on speculators, Senator Elizabeth Warren made a bundle by flipping houses.
N early two years after Veo Vessels died, her daughter, 70-year-old Mary Frances Hickman, decided to sell the home her mother had left to her. A sprawling brick house in Oklahoma City’s historic Highland Park neighborhood, it was built in 1924, just a year after Mary’s birth.
Decades later, one of Vessels’ great-grandchildren fondly recalls the wood and tile floors, the fish pond, the butler’s quarters, and the multi-car garage where children played house.
“It was really, really nice,” says Hickman’s granddaughter, Andrea Martin. That’s part of the reason she’s so surprised her grandmother sold the home in 1993 for a mere $30,000. Despite a debilitating stroke, Martin says Hickman remained sharp, and she had always been business-savvy. As an Avon saleswoman, she had at times ranked among the top ten in the country. “So I don’t know why,” Martin says. “Maybe she just wanted out from underneath it, but to sell it for such a low number — I don’t know. Maybe she got bad advice, maybe she was just tired.”
The home’s new owner: Elizabeth Warren, today a Massachusetts senator who has built a political career on denouncing the sort of banking titans and financial sophisticates who make a buck off the little guy. Five months after purchasing Veo Vessels’ old home, Warren flipped the property, selling it for $115,000 more than she’d paid, according to Oklahoma County Property Assessor records.
Warren rose to political prominence in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis as a crusader against big banks and a dispenser of common-sense economic advice. She campaigned for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, intended to shield people from the predations of the mortgage and credit-card industries, among others. In her 2006 book All Your Worth, co-authored with her daughter, Amelia, Warren lists as a top myth the idea that “you can make big money buying houses and flipping them quickly.” She has made a career out of telling people how to behave in financially responsible ways, and out of creating laws that will make it illegal for them to do otherwise.
Five months after purchasing Veo Vessels’ old home, Warren flipped the property, selling it for $115,000 more than she’d paid.
But Warren bought and sold at least five properties for profit at a different time in her life, before the cratering economy and a political career made her a star. Her life story has been the subject of much interest, and her 2014 memoir, A Fighting Chance , chronicled her rise from humble beginnings in small-town Oklahoma and her struggle to make ends meet. It didn’t much mention, though, the early 1990s, years when her children were teenagers and she was once again happily married. These are years when she wasn’t yet the multimillionaire she is today, and, she has said, she was voting Republican.
As a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, and later as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, she was doing well for herself, building both her professional profile and her wealth. She owes at least part of her considerable financial success, it seems, to snapping up these properties in her native Oklahoma and turning them for a profit — though today that’s not a practice she endorses for the many people looking to emulate her success. The Boston Herald reported on these purchases during Warren’s Senate run in 2012, noting that she invested in “the often topsy-turvy real-estate market of the 1990s” and that her actions “don’t seem to square with her public statements about the latest real estate boom and bust.”
(By our deadline, Warren’s office did not respond to our request for an interview with the senator or for a request for comment from the senator’s spokesperson about the home sales.)
Hickman’s granddaughter Martin says of the home flip: “I don’t think it’s right, but I don’t really know much about it. . . . You flip houses to make a profit, so I can’t really fault [Warren] much. I think my grandmother made a mistake by selling it for so cheap. . . . She had worked hard all her life and was a self-made woman.”
Don Vessels — a grandson of Veo Vessels, and the nephew of Mary Frances Hickman — said he had not known that Warren had purchased the family home, but “my reaction is that it’s kind of par for the course.” He added: “What’s said and what’s done in politics are two different things. Mary Hickman, being the executor of the estate, should have sold it for the highest price on the market, which I’m not sure she did. But the house was not in fantastic shape, I can tell you that. It was a very nice house when it was purchased, but my grandmother kind of let it fall into disrepair.”
Records show Warren bought the house Hickman inherited from her mother, located at 200 N.W. 16th Street, in August 1993 and quickly obtained permits to do plumbing and electrical work, selling it five months later for a 383 percent gain.
House flipping is commonly defined as the practice of buying and selling a home within six months, as the future senator did with the Hickman property. Warren held onto at least four other properties for longer periods, sometimes waiting a year before relinquishing ownership and, at other times, as long as seven years.
Warren bought two homes after they’d fallen into foreclosure. And though she spent money fixing up the Hickman home before selling it, records suggest she sold others at a significant profit without making any meaningful upgrades.
Warren bought two homes after they’d fallen into foreclosure. Records suggest she sold them at a significant profit without making any meaningful upgrades.
In 1993, Warren bought a foreclosed property on N.W. 14th Street in Oklahoma City for $4,000. National Review attempted to contact the couple who had owned it. No phone number or email could be found on record for them, and they did not respond to a letter mailed to their last known address, in Colorado. No public records could be found elaborating on the events that led to the foreclosure of their home.
In 2004, Warren transferred the home to her brother, John Herring, and his wife, who sold it for $30,000 in 2006, a 650 percent increase over what Warren initially paid for it. Neither Warren nor her brother filed any permits to make improvements.
In June 1993, Warren bought another foreclosed property in Oklahoma City, this one on West Wilshire Boulevard, for $61,000 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Because properties purchased from HUD are sold as is, and because foreclosed homes can have damage ranging from simple poor upkeep to stripped copper, “the only reason you do that is for profit,” says Steve Stout, residential field supervisor at the Oklahoma County Assessor’s Office.
O n the national stage, Warren has been outspoken about the dangers of home foreclosure. In a 2002 book, The Fragile Middle Class , co-authored with Teresa Sullivan and Jay Lawrence Westerbrook, she wrote that foreclosures are “notorious for fetching low prices.” And as a professor at Harvard Law School, in the wake of the financial crisis, Warren served as a member of the congressional panel overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The panel produced, among other things, a report on the foreclosures taking place across the country. It began with a paean to the place of the home in American life: “Foreclosures are about the home,” it said, which is “the physical and emotional nexus of many households as well as the centerpiece of many Americans’ finances.” Foreclosures, it concluded, “can harm other homeowners both by encouraging additional foreclosures and by reducing home sale prices, while decreased property values hurt local businesses and reduce state and local tax revenues.”
A year after buying the foreclosed property on West Wilshire Boulevard, Warren also bought the house next door for $72,000. Despite filing no building permits to renovate at either property, Warren pocketed $34,000 in profits when she sold the first house in December 1994, and she and her husband, Bruce Mann, made an additional $32,000 when they sold the one next door in 1998.
That same year, Warren sold another home she and Mann owned for a sizeable profit. The couple had purchased the property, at 4721 Dove Tree Lane, in 1991, filing permits for mechanical and plumbing repairs, according to Oklahoma County Assessor’s Office records.
“We’re talking about more than just painting or minor repairs,” says Stout, adding that it could add up to tens of thousands of dollars. “It’s serious work.” Still, the investment seems to have paid off: Warren and her husband paid only $50,000 for the house and sold it for $109,500, a 119 percent gain.
The profits from these flipped homes adds up: Even excluding the property sold by her brother, Warren and her husband have made at least $240,500 flipping homes (before deducting the unknown sum they invested in remodeling). In her 2014 autobiography, Warren wrote of the events that precipitated the financial crisis that “everyone seemed to have a story about someone they knew who was getting rich by flipping houses.”
She omitted a crucial one.
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Just remember Socialism is for the people not the Socialist.
Another item for The Elizabeth Warren File
LETTER: Warren didn’t stand up for low-income Harvard employees
When I was a guest on Nightside with Dan Rea ( audio of last appearance — no audio of show mentioned below) shortly prior to the election, a caller brought up an incident in 2009 when Elizabeth Warren and other Harvard Law faculty did nothing, and did not offer up their own pay cuts, to help save staff positions, including in the Harvard Law library , in the wake of the 2008 market turmoil which caused Harvard to seek to reduce overhead.
I did a little research on the subject , and confirmed what the caller said. But in the crush of events and issues in the days before the election, I never got around to posting about it.
Not that it would have made a difference in the election. If voters were willing to ignore Warren’s ethnic fraud, among other things, a little hypocrisy when it comes to saving law school staff jobs wasn’t going to sway them.
Nonetheless, I regretted not posting about it because getting the truth out about Elizabeth Warren is important given her demeaning rhetoric towards people who disagree with her. Which is why I’m hoping (I said hoping, not guaranteeing) to have The Elizabeth Warren File live by the day she is sworn in in early January.
Getting back to the staff jobs, The Cambridge, MA, Wicked Local just ran a letter to the editor which sounds like it was from that caller, LETTER: Warren didn’t stand up for low-income Harvard employees
Thank you Stephen for getting the word out.
~Link~
Elizabeth Warren is one of the biggest hypocrites to get elected in a long time.
There was something about her that reminded me of Ted Kennedy right from the get go.
She's hoping the people get dumber and mover further to the left by 2020, so she can run for President.
"The problem here, in case anyone hasn’t noticed yet, is that this “Elizabeth Warren, Feminist Hero, Courageous Victim” narrative is completely misplaced.
The Senate rules are gender-neutral. Explicitly so. Warren knowingly violated them, either because she just doesn’t care, or because she doesn’t know the difference between what’s allowed at a rally and what’s allowed on the Senate floor.
And for that, she’s a feminist icon? Please, spare me." I liked the above quote.