If the Democrats take over the Senate next year, Warren will be in the catbird seat. As David Bernstein detailed in Politico last month, she continues to collect chits with her Senate colleagues thanks to her prodigious fundraising on their behalf – something which Warren’s populist colleague Bernie Sanders has never been in a position to emulate (though perhaps he will leverage his shiny new email list on behalf of some Senate candidates in the fall.)
If she gives that up to be Clinton’s junior partner in the White House, what does she get? The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim made the case that she would gain influence upon entering the White House because she was proven the winner of “internal knife fights” when setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a Treasury appointee. Grim argues her reach would be wide as VP: “whether it’s the CFPB, the Fed, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission … or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation … Warren would not need [Dick] Cheney-level power to move the needle inside those regulatory bodies.”
But Grim’s reference to Cheney undercuts the case. Cheney only had power to the extent that President George W. Bush allowed. As the New York Times’ Peter Baker explained, while he was highly influential in Bush’s first term, by the second he was “on defense more than offense. … Bush and Cheney disagreed on a long list of significant issues and policies. Where Bush was willing to pursue international diplomacy, empty secret C.I.A. prisons, sign an agreement to withdraw from Iraq and cut deals with Congress on military tribunals and warrantless eavesdropping, Cheney resisted any compromise as a sellout of the principles they once shared.”
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