Hillary Clinton desperately wants liberals to redirect their adoration of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) toward her presidential campaign. Since the official launch of her 2016 run earlier this month, Clinton has done everything she can to cozy up to Warren and publicly channel the spirit of the Massachusetts senator. Clinton has bemoaned hedge funders paying lower tax rates and called out CEOs for earning outsize paychecks. She penned a fawning blurb about Warren for Time's list of the world's 100 most influential people. "Elizabeth Warren never lets us forget that the work of taming Wall Street's irresponsible risk taking and reforming our financial system is far from finished," Clinton wrote. "And she never hesitates to hold powerful people's feet to the fire: bankers, lobbyists, senior government officials and, yes, even presidential aspirants."
Beyond this broad political rhetoric, Clinton so far has been unwilling to reveal where exactly her views align with Warren's. She launched her campaign by traveling to Iowa and New Hampshire for a "listening tour" of sorts, with detailed ideas promised to come later in the year. A spokesman for the Clinton campaign declined to say if Hillary Clinton would support a list of specific ideas proposed by Warren, such as breaking up big banks and imposing new taxes on financial transactions.
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Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson said in a statement to Mother Jones. "The campaign is only two weeks old and we will be detailing our policy agenda after our ramp up period ends this summer but Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton share a record of and a commitment to fighting for everyday Americans and their families."
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Mother Jones sent a detailed list of these policy proposals to the Clinton campaign for comment, but it declined to weigh in on any specifics. Among Warren's suggestions:
* Breaking up the largest banks and setting a cap on the size of banks.
* Reinstating the parts of the Glass-Steagall Act repealed during Bill Clinton's presidency that required a separation between commercial and investment banking.
* Allowing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency Warren created, to regulate car dealers as subprime auto loans explode.
* Putting a stop to deferred prosecution agreements between the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and financial firms accused of wrongdoing.
* Passing a financial transaction tax that would reduce risky high-frequency trading.
* Requiring the Federal Reserve board to vote on all major enforcement and supervisory decisions.
* Closing loopholes in the tax code that encourage financial firms to reward their executives with lavish performance-based bonuses.
Warren directly called out her Republican colleagues in Congress who have voted to erase financial regulations and defund watchdog agencies. But her criticism just as easily could have been directed at the current front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
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Warren has been skeptical of Clinton's views on financial regulation for quite some time. In an appearance with Bill Moyers in 2004, Warren told a story about how, as first lady, Clinton had opposed a bankruptcy reform measure that favored the banks over consumers, only to turn around and vote for the bill when she later became a senator from New York. "She has taken money from [Wall Street] groups, and more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency," Warren said.
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