Elizabeth Warren’s CNN Town Hall, Medicare for All, Electoral College and reparations

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Elizabeth Warren's CNN Town Hall, Medicare for All, Electoral College and reparations

74 thoughts on “Elizabeth Warren’s CNN Town Hall, Medicare for All, Electoral College and reparations

    • +F Z Oh sorry i thought the OP was talking about reperations. It’s the last thing Kim said in the video so my mind wasnt on M4A at that time lol

    • TCt83067695 TCt83067695 oh lol I didn’t make it to the end. Her redlining reparations policy is excellent though. I think it’s the only substantive reparations policy anyone has introduced that’s specifically targeted. Tulsi also endorsed HR 40 but I think that’s largely symbolism and starting a study, which does need to be done. Other than warrens weird refusal to clearly back single payer, and I’m not sure her position on college, I actually think she has better policy than Bernie though. She just has bad/no strategy to get it done, and won’t use the bully pulpit to call out the DNC, dem establishment, dem donors. As far as I can tell it’s gotta be Bernie or some horribly corrupt centrist like kamala or Biden.

      At this point I feel like Bernie’s campaign must see endorsing reparations in a race specific targeted way as a political liability, which makes sense because otherwise CNN wouldn’t have tried to corner him with it, and in polls 70% of people oppose it. I wish they were smarter about marketing their policy as a black agenda though. Without anything race specific Bernie’s platform would still be the biggest gains for black Americans since the civil rights act. It’d also be pretty easy to make a cogent argument like “its impossible to actually make up for what happened financially because it can’t be quantified and if it could it would be impossibly large, so we need to make the goal closing the racial wealth gap, here are 5 policies that will help do that”. That’s the truth anyways and i think people would embrace that

    • +F Z Couldnt have said it better myself. Her policies specifically the wealth tax and breaking up big tech are obviously more progressive than Bernie. I’m just worried she wouldnt have the fighting spirit like Bernie or Tulsi.

      Also, 100% agreement on the marketing of Bernie’s policies to AA. I’ve definitely softened on my previous position of ‘i dont want no handout from nobody’ so i’m definitely open to the bill in the house to do a study but for me it’s not as important as Bernie’s major policy platforms. So they need to market better.
      There’s a lot on the line, Bernie’s ppl. Advice the man dammit lol

    • She’s too cowardly when it comes to political positioning and calling out the corruption of the Democratic Party and donor class, and she makes bad political calculations sometimes. I really don’t see her as a contender here, and I actually am a bit worried about Bernie choosing her as VP. I don’t think she has wide appeal beyond the democratic base. It may be a little sexist/ageist but to me she comes across as too professorial, frail, and weak. As much as I dislike kamala harris I think she’s a much better political performer.

      But on HER OWN policy proposals, warren is the most substantive politician I’ve ever seen, including in comparison to Bernie. More proposals, more detailed, often more creative and nuanced. Her redlining reparations policy is excellent, she has a good vid that breaks it down on her YouTube. And it costs nothing to the taxpayer. Her anti corruption bill is better than anything Bernie has proposed in that area imo. Same with her bill to have labor represented on the boards of big business. The problem is she doesn’t match her very good and very disruptive game changing systemic reforms in policy to a strategy that’s equally as radical. Bernie does. Part of that is being willing to call out the Dems and dnc and donors with the bully pulpit, which even Bernie has done relatively little of since 2015 but more than anyone else, and then having mass movement outside or partially overlapping with the Democratic Party. For either of them to get anything done as president they’d need to go around calling out corrupt democrats to shame them with public pressure and primary them. It seems incredibly unlikely she’d do that.

      I think she’s either running for VP, or with the thought that she can be a backup if they steal it from sanders and/or it goes to a second ballot at the convention, because she’s the most acceptable to his base while also being more acceptable to the establishment than a Tulsi Gabbard or an andrew yang. Hopefully they’re coordinating, if Liz doesn’t actively assist Bernie in terms of dropping out and/or transferring delegates she will absolutely ruin her name and legacy permanently. So I assume they’re coordinating, Bernie has spoken very positively of her, but who knows what that means.

    • Relax…Bernie will NEVER choose her as a running mate…(too old, too wishy washy on issues, and highly suspect after her endorsement of Queen Hillary over him in 2016)…my money’s on Tulsi or Nina…

  1. So if you are so big on “representation for taxation” as the reason to keep electoral college”l, why did you not bring DC and Peurto Rico?

    Also to consider … why not introduce ranked-choice voting to balance out the electoral college process?

    • The Truth

      Exactly. All the more reason to abolish electoral college as the “taxation without representation” shtick does not consistently justify it to all territories.

    • +Manoj Menon I am with you.
      We need to get money out of politics.
      We need to pass HR1 without putting additional restrictions on third-party candidates, because whether it’s the Republicans with John McCain or the Democrats with Nancy Pelosi passing election reform somehow always seems to hurt grassroots organizing and third-party campaigning it’s funny how that works you can’t fix the system without closing the door behind you.
      By passing HR1 it been an gerrymanders the districts which means the Republicans will lose seats in the house.
      It will also help motivate people to partake in our democracy.
      All 5 US territories should be offered statehood not for the reason of eliminating Republican control of the Senate but because they deserve to be treated fairly and equally.
      Then you get rid of the electoral college so that the American people are directly electing their president.
      When ever you listen to Kim’s opinion it’s important that you also find out what she’s not telling you. Did our democracy start to crumble in 1913 when we started to directly vote for senators, because before then state legislators used to put senators in office? Would you like to go back to your governor and your state legislative body picking up who the senators to represent your state are going to be???
      Note to self there would be no senator Bernie Sanders there would be no senator Elizabeth Warren. Think about it.

    • RydarGames yes they do you have to pay federal taxes they just don’t have to pay income tax. They pay payroll taxes, Social Security and Medicaid.

    • And completely inefficient at what their task is supposed to be. They were put together to prevent another devastating defeat like McGovern suffered to Nixon, and just 12 years later with superdelegates they lose by almost the same margin with Mondale being beaten by Reagan. Superdelegates are only there to make sure that progressives don’t win!

  2. In 1870, almost 50 percent of the U.S. population was employed in agriculture. As of 2008, less than 2 percent of the population is directly employed in agriculture… So I wouldn’t say that’s a good argument for why we need the electoral college.

    And I just don’t agree that “one community, one vote”. I live in Wyoming and as a progressive my vote literally is meaningless towards the president. It means many with my mindset, don’t vote AT ALL. I sometimes don’t even feel the need to vote but I do just out of principal. If people in my position (both liberals in red areas and conservatives in blue) don’t even have a voice because of where we live, in the largest deciding factor for our entire nation, the presidential election, than how are we being represented at all?

    • I just want to say I’m stoked that this comment section is having such a good debate on this. Consider me undecided.

    • I grew up in California. If you think giving up the say of your state for people in NY and Ca, you are a fool. I literally walk by homeless people screaming at the sky and punching random citizens for no reason. Every. Single. Day. Not to mention the gang bangers armed to the teeth.

  3. The United States Senate already over represents rural states in a very corrosive way. Wyoming 400k people gets same as 39 MM in California? rethink it!

    • The Truth we’re not talking about The House. The Senate has more power than the House so people’s criticism of unequal representation is justified. Just because The House has proper representation, it doesn’t mean that the Senate not having it is ok. And when the 2 senators per state policy was created in 1788, CA (the most populous state) wasn’t even a state back then. I’m guessing that around that time, there wasn’t much of a drastic difference in population as there is now so when people talk about how the founding fathers designed the system, it’s ignoring the fact that things are completely different now and if the same people were to design a system based on today’s landscape, they most likely would’ve done it differently.

    • +The Truth Most of my time living in CA I was not only represented by two women, I was represented by two Jewish women, when there should be only two Jews in the entire senate. Fix that and we’re on to something…

    • +veronica wicker (and Tyler): I imagine you’re both talking about the same kind of representation – “local representatives” and “state representatives”. Like I said, that’s something to think about. My immediate reaction to that is it’s another level of separation of citizens from government. Seems natural to me that we would vote directly at each level we are represented (from federal to state to local). If we elect this group of people to elect senators and whatever, with the idea that they would be more qualified than the general population to elect legislators, that seems like it could be another level of “bureaucracy” to be attacked by forces of corruption.

      I’m not a fan of “states rights”. Only people have rights, not governments. I’ve never thought of myself as a “Californian”, but as an American citizen (not that state and local governments don’t have their important roles to fill). Kim Iverson seems to feel that each state is much like an independent country. That idea, like yours here, is new to me.

      Lately I’m more optimistic about the judgement of the general US population. Maybe the reason fewer and fewer are voting is because they sense the meaninglessness of their choices. One poll found that 52% of even Republicans favored single payer (IMO a no-brainer) health care. But yes, if we as voters (myself included) were more aware and discerning, we would have gotten better results in recent times. I can’t deny that. I’m sort of in sympathy with those lefties that claim the system intentionally tries to keep us intellectually unequipped, and distracted. But if we aren’t qualified to pick a senator, what makes us qualified to choose a local rep? And why would our local rep feel accountable to us, and to what degree?

    • lifeform carbon If the states are divided up into districts based on population as most states are, then people in a state would have just as much representation as each other in their state governments. The federal government was initially designed to be a coalition states(small countries) working together to defend against invadors.
      The smaller states were not going to join the other states because they would overpowered by larger more populated states. This could have left those states free to side with an enemy or be a refuge for enemies. In order to convince them to join for the safety of the rest of the states, they we’re given equal representation in the Senate. The house of representatives remained based on population. The United States would have been fractured had it not been for this fact.

    • The federal government was supposed to facilitate free trade and safety from enemies which it did through enabling communication between the states through the postal service, creating a common army, and creating foreign diplomats. However, the federal government has grown out of control and people have forgotten that our true representatives who are supposed to pass laws for regulating and educating the public are our state legislators. Local people we can meet at town halls and learn about through their history are who we are supposed vote on democratically. If everyone focused on this election alone, we would have more time and energy actually investigating candidates and money would have less influence in politics.

  4. I used to really like Warren. However the more she is asked questions the more of a pushover she’s shown herself to be.

    • +AVGPVP Bernie is such a unique character that it’s very scary to think that we will never get someone like him. Specially because of how consistent he’s been in the last 40 or 50 years.
      However, his exposure has been magnificent in the last couple of years and I believe at least one or two worthy figures will arise that can take his torch when he finally leaves us.

    • Ditto more than a decade ago she was a consumer advocate prof.interviewed in esoteric muck raking documentaries, she seemed so focused and on point. After 2016 she’s really seem more adrift, I doubt she’ll survive the primaries, against Tulsi, Bernie or Yang. Then again it may not matter and the DNC will select Biden or some other corporate moneyed stool pigeon.

    • Warren: “I’ll endorse single payer to enhance my image, then if elected allow a corrupt substitute.” She’s either deceitful, or worse, too goddam stupid for President.

  5. “anything” doesn’t go in a constitutional convention. This is a myth. Please don’t push it. The first constitutional convention, that wrote the constitution, did not happen under the rules of the constitution. It created the rules and so now there are rules.

    • Person Oisels The Constitutional Convention did break the rules by ignoring instructions by several states to comply with the Articles of Confederation which required unanimous ratification of any amendments to the Articles. Instead the Constitution declared itself ratified with only nine states.

    • +rutex09 You’re not addressing anything I said. If you are saying that the constitution can just be violated willy nilly, then the US is in trouble regardless of a convention or not. The original convention did not operate under article 5 of the US constitution, it was not an article 5 convention because article 5 did not exist at the time.

    • +Person Oisels The original convention did operate under Article 13 of the Articles of Confederation. It broke it.

      Article V’s plain meaning is “anything goes.” Most if not all calls for a constitutional convention have been for a single amendment but there’s nothing in Article V precluding a call for a Pandora’s Box even if that’s not on offer at the moment.

      To deny that is to deny that we can have an amendment abolishing Article V.

      But in practice, it’s not ridiculous to game out a scenario in which a single amendment convention has enough political credibility to unofficially offer further amendments as resolutions to be ratified later on the up and up.

    • +rutex09 The plain reading still requires that any proposed amendment be ratified. they can’t just change the whole thing because they feel like it, that’s the point. If you call a covention to discuss a topic,whether other topics can still be discussed is up inthe air, but they aren’t going to ratify sweeping random changes (and if they really wanted to abolish half the constitution, congress has the power to do amendments by itself anyway).

      And yeah, maybe the first one was under different rules, but those rules were different.

  6. No,no,no not everything goes in a constitutional convention. That has rules and not everything can be proposed or voted

    • exactly. the proposals introduced in a convention have to be specific & still requires 2/3 of the states to even call the convention, let alone ratify the amendment. you’re not going to get a “totally new governing document” given those stipulations. that’s why it’s so rare. i’m very disappointed with Kim’s perspective on this. she’s totally wrong.

    • This is not true and a mis reading of article V. When 2/3 of the States request a convention to suggest changes to the Constitution then almost anything goes as each State can suggest changes to any part of the Constitution as it deem necessary. The exception to making changes is that in no way can changes affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

      Show where when the States call for a convention its for a single issue only. The plain language of Article V says ‘CHANGES’ which is the plural of CHANGE.

    • +Big Unc “then almost anything goes…” this is inaccurate, and why i said the proposed amendments must be specific. if for no other reason than the exceedingly high bar for ratification. you’re not going to get 38 states to agree to ratify deviations wildly outside the basis for which they are calling the convention in the first place.

      https://www.termlimits.com/article-v/article-v-myths/

    • +Jordan Smith thats not what the Constitution’s Article V says. Doing one amendment at a time may be the pattern and practice when Congress amends the Constitution but when the legislature of 2/3 of the States call for a convention they can suggest changes/revision of any portion of the document except what I mentioned in my previous post. Read the plain language of Article V. You can’t arbitrarily change Article V to suit your desires. The brake to stop any percieved overreaching is the 2/3 ratification process.

  7. Why vote for her when we have a true leader and progressive in Bernie. Remember she supported Hillary over Bernie in 2016

    • She cares too much about her image to be relied on; she proved it when she endorsed Hillary. Whereas Tulsi resigned from the DNC and endorsed Bernie Sanders. Tulsi is the true leader. If I were American I’d split my vote between Bernie and Tulsi.

  8. Abolishing the Electoral College doesn’t take away representation, it just gives them EQUAL representation. People in cities have “taxation with less representation”, only there’s more of them.

    • +Cheydinal There was no national popular vote because there was no means to achieve that, the whole Idea of the founding fathers deciding against that is just bullshit.

    • +MEN56 The founding fathers were against a national popular vote, obviously. They were also against state-wide popular vote election of Electors, Madison and Hamilton explicitely protested that as it was happening in the late 1700s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College

      They didn’t have a problem with state legislatures appointing Electors though. They said they originally envisioned that Electors would be chosen by the people in districts, and then the Electors would be free to look at the available candidates, and cast their vote in a deliberate manner, unlike how the populous vote have been voting.

      They never intended state-wide voting blocks, if that had been what they wanted, they could have easily written that into the Constitution

    • +Cheydinal All I’m saying is that a national vote wasn’t a viable option. The construction of the country was based on a federation of states with a federal government of limited power, so everything was based on what happened in those states. If a state wanted a certain candidate to win an election with a national popular vote, they could just misreport the vote in their state and there would have been nothing anyone could do about that. The concept of representative government in a democracy was an absolute necessity then, there was no way to have anything approaching direct democracy just from a mechanical standpoint, and that remains the case today.

      The desire of states to have maximum impact on the outcome based on their desire as a state is reflected in almost every state giving all its electoral votes to the winner in that state. In that past that would have been accomplished through electoral fraud, or perhaps even a state law that converted all of its state votes to being placed for the winner in the state once that’s determined.

      The issue today is that we can have direct democracy, and that makes more sense in a country which is now much more of a nation and not a collection of federated states, amendments to the constitution and court interpretations have led to that. The electoral college is an unnecessary relic, but it stays in place because we have ended up with this two-party pseudo-democracy, and so one party will always benefit by that.

    • +MEN56 Back then the people voting for Electors and making them vote for a candidate they wanted was just a means to an end, which was basically an approximation of a national popular vote. Originally the idea of Electors was not a “counting trick”, so to speak, but it was really to have independent Electors who decide independently what candidate they want to vote for. Hamilton and Madison were outraged when people ordered their Electors to vote a certain way

  9. Eliminating the electoral college means every vote would matter. Currently our votes mean nothing if we’re from either blue or red states, it only matters in swing states. Not everyone in NY votes blue and not everyone in Mississippi votes red.

    • If the electoral college wasn’t winner take all for the electoral votes and was divided percentage wise then I would be fine with the electoral college.

  10. A Constitutional Convention can only used to propose amendments. Nothing gets passed into law. Those amendments must still be ratified.

  11. I like Liz as a Senator or a cabinet member like Secretary of the Treasury but Tulsi is my top choice with Bernie my second choice.

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