During her now-infamous Senate tirade against the confirmation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) criticized the former Alabama senator because his office suggested in a press release that a wealthy American corporation should hire Americans.
One would think Warren, who has been mocked as “Pocahontas” or “Fauxcahontas” for misrepresenting herself as a Native American to obtain preferential treatment, would be less cavalier toward Americans with serious questions about their own career prospects.
While there has been much media consternation over the populist direction of the Republican Party under President Donald Trump, there hasn’t been much discussion of the Democratic Party’s brand of populism, which finds its most vocal proponents in figures like Elizabeth Warren and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Indeed, many of the Democrat policies over the past generation could be critiqued as populist — what better term for promises of “free” college tuition or health care?
The worst brand of populism attempts to manipulate the public by creating devil figures to play on its fears. About 35 hours into Warren’s tirade against Sessions on the Senate floor, she played that game with White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, who formerly served as communications director for Senator Jeff Sessions of Arkansas. (It’s actually 35 minutes into the clip below. It only feels like 35 hours.)
Warren quoted extensively from a Daily Beast article, which sought to link Sessions to President Trump’s executive order for a temporary pause in visas and refugee applications from certain countries — incorrectly labeled a “refugee ban,” of course, because the media has demonstrated a comprehensive inability to discuss the executive order honestly.
The idea behind the article was to cite the voluminous press releases Miller emailed when he was working for Sessions and suggest that Miller remained a puppet of Sessions even after he left to work for the Trump White House. (Or maybe Sessions is supposed to be a puppet of Miller. In any event, the gist of the argument Warren borrowed for her theatrical meltdown is that Sessions and Miller are excessively worried about terrorism — an argument that worked fantastically well with voters in 2016, propelling Hillary Clinton into the White House.)
Among the ostensibly outrageous emails Miller sent when he worked for Sessions was “a link to a Facebook stock page on Google Finance with the subject line: ‘Does this mean Facebook has enough money now to hire Americans?’”
This seems like an odd digression for a Warren hit that was supposed to be about Jeff Sessions’ alleged super-racist paranoid hostility to immigration. (She read the Daily Beast article right after reading the letter from Coretta Scott King condemning Sessions.)
But since she brought it up: why doesn’t she care about mega-wealthy corporations claiming they need more immigrant labor to remain profitable? All that Democrat posturing about their concern for the Little Guy goes right out the window when it’s time to push for open-borders immigration, serve the needs of their big-money donors, or score cheap political points against a Republican.
Democrats resolutely refuse to engage with the effect of madcap immigration policies on American unemployment and wages. It’s one of the big reasons Trump did so well with the “forgotten men” (and women!) who resent their status as designated losers under Democrat central planning.
Warren and her party have nothing to say when American workers, wearing both blue collars and white, question the wisdom of importing huge numbers of people for the express purpose of driving down U.S. wages, and the implied purpose of covering for the failure of our Democrat-dominated education system. Whose fault is it, exactly, when employers claim they need imported labor to handle jobs Americans can’t or won’t do?
The whole thing was a bizarre waste of time during a deliberation about whether Senator Sessions was fit to serve as Attorney General. Apparently Democrats still labor under the grave misapprehension that American voters think disagreement with Democratic orthodoxy is some sort of crime.
Democrats know they can’t stop Trump’s Cabinet nominees — the American people made damn sure of that — so they’ve used confirmation hearings to perform drive-by character assassinations, lay the groundwork for future assaults on Trump administration officials, whip up their demoralized voters, and (in Warren’s case) stage publicity stunts for their new books. None of that has anything to do with advice and consent for Cabinet nominees.
Maybe Warren can take a break from reading other people’s writing into the Senate record and explain exactly why Stephen Miller was out of line for wondering if soaring corporate profits should translate into more American jobs. Her Faux-pulism rings hollow to people who see a difference between asking serious questions of Big Business and picking the pockets of random rich people to partially finance Democrat “free stuff” fantasies.