Star Member George II (39,902 posts)

34. So, what do you think about her vote against reopening the government earlier this year....

....because she was against funding for ICE, not realizing that the bill she voted against didn't even contain any funding for ICE? "Stand up for what is right"? That's fine, as long as it truly is RIGHT.

Joe Biden, former vice president and 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful, said Friday he would bring back the individual mandate, the penalty for not having health insurance, which was a pillar of the Affordable Care Act.

“Yes, I’d bring back the individual mandate,” Biden said in an interview on CNN. The individual mandate would be popular now, “compared to what’s being offered,” he added.

Biden played an integral part in crafting the ACA, commonly known as Obamacare. However, President Donald Trump eliminated the individual mandate in 2017 by signing the Republican tax bill, effective the 2019 tax year.

Joe Biden was outraged. In February 2005, after eight years of starts and stops, the Senate was finally moving forward on a landmark overhaul of the nation’s bankruptcy laws—a bipartisan behemoth piece of legislation, backed by big banks and credit card companies, that the Delaware senator had taken a lead role in shepherding. But at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s public hearing on the bill, one of the witnesses had said something about his home state that Biden couldn’t let stand.

The witness’ specific concern was Delaware’s unique status as the venue of choice for large corporations filing for bankruptcy. Companies understood that the courts there (where many of the companies were nominally incorporated) were more likely to take their side against creditors, such as employee pension plans. And the venue-shopping opened up a broader issue of access; massive companies such as Enron could choose a forum thousands of miles away from where their employees lived, effectively shutting the workers out of the process. The Delaware option allowed companies to “escape the obligation to make the process open,” the witness said, while the millions of individuals filing for personal bankruptcy every year had no such luxury.

It was not the first time the pair had clashed, and it wouldn’t be the last. Long before their Capitol Hill clash, Warren called out Biden by name in op-eds and in her first book, accusing him of carrying water for the big corporations that called his state home and kept his campaign coffers full.

The bankruptcy fight was a pivotal moment for both Warren and Biden, who have each built a political brand based on a defense of the American middle class. Biden is fond of saying that he talks about working families so often his colleagues called him “Middle-Class Joe.” (Exactly who has ever called him that is a mystery.) Warren’s 2017 book was subtitled “The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class.” But there’s a key difference. In Warren’s telling, politicians like Joe Biden are exactly who the middle class needs protection from. And as the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign slowly heats up, the two may be on a collision course once more.