How Elizabeth Warren Led "The Great Swaps Rebellion of 2014"--what the Repubs Can Expect in January

[KoKo]

How Elizabeth Warren Led The Great Swaps Rebellion of 2014

She nearly killed a spending deal, and that matters.

Warren's savant mastery of the media enabled some of them. But she didn't create the sentiment. The Democratic conferences in the next House and Senate will be, famously, deprived of any conservatives from the deep South. The Blue Dog caucus that was most open to entreaties from Wall Street has been reduced to a harmless rump.

by David Weigel
Dec 12, 2014 9:30 AM EST

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-12-12/the-great-swaps-rebellion-of-2014-and-elizabeth-warrens-postobama-democratic-party

John Carney couldn’t understand why the vote was so close. The Delaware congressman, a Democratic member of the House Financial Services Committee, had been there when a reform to the Dodd-Frank “swaps push-out” passed—in a 55-6 landslide. He’d joined a veto-proof majority, 292-122, to back the reform in a House bill that was throttled by the Democratic Senate. The bank-friendly Democrat had not expected the reform’s quiet return, as a rider in the must-pass “Cromnibus” spending package, to kick off a revolt.

“This passed with nearly 300 votes,” said Carney on Thursday night, after the House had voted on the Cromnibus, and as legislators of both parties congratulated him or wished him Merry Christmas. “It would have been more than 300, like some of the other bills we’ve done, if there wasn’t this toxic description of what it might do. Unfortunately, the world we live in, the political world, is one of perception. I try to deal with the facts. Sometimes that’s at odds with the way we do work here, where you get these political narratives that take on a larger than life part of the discussion.”

Put it this way: Carney was not Ready for Warren. For the better part of two days, most of his fellow Democrats approached the Cromnibus—which did not de-fund the president's immigration order, or the bulk of the Affordable Care Act—as a sell-out of cosmic proportion. This started when Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a Wednesday floor speech challenging her colleagues to restore swaps push-out, which prohibited banks from booking derivatives in their own subsidiaries.

"The financial industry spent more than $1 million a day lobbying Congress on financial reform, and a lot of that money went to former elected officials and government employees," said Warren. "And now we see the fruits of those investments. This provision is all about goosing the profits of the big banks."

The backlash should have been predictable. As Carney recalled, the original bill to change the swaps rule lost some votes after critical media coverage. More specifically, the New York Times reporters Eric Lipton and Ben Protess noticed that Citigroup had practically written the swaps language; its "recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill."

Yet it didn't become "toxic" until the fight over the "Cromnibus." Warren made the swaps language infamous. In the House, she found an impromptu whip team led by Illinois Representative Jan Schakowsky and the party's ranking member on the Financial Services Committee, California Representative Maxine Waters. She found an ally in the Minority Leader, California Representative Nancy Pelosi, who took the floor on Thursday to warn that the swaps rule was exactly the sort of time-bomb that could create another financial crisis in the pattern of 2008.

This rattled the Democrats' appropriators, some of whom were heading for the exits. Virginia Representative Jim Moran spent a good part of Thursday telling reporters that Warren was "running for president" and drowning Democrats in her ambition.

"She obviously has a lot of influence," said Moran after the votes. "The media listens to everything she says."

And that was why she mattered—and would continue to matter, even as she rebuffs admirers who want her to wage a quixotic presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton. Warren's rebellion was an omen of what Republicans could expect from the Democrats in January, when they took command of the Senate and a larger majority in the House. Warren had led most of the party's left in an impromptu alliance with the inconsolable Republican right. Only 162 House Republicans voted for the "Cromnibus," which augered a future in which Democrats could determine whether key bills passed or failed. The Democrats, freed of the burden of congressional leadership, could make the Republican bills infamous. They could even do so while separating themselves from the Obama White House

Continued with Much More about Strategy for Dems in the Coming year at.........
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-12-12/the-great-swaps-rebellion-of-2014-and-elizabeth-warrens-postobama-democratic-party