by Jan Soma, Progressive Needham
There was a crowd that overflowed the large hall, and the energy resonated. Murmurs, clapping, shouts — it was clear that the audience was excited to be there.
Where were they? The applause was coming from people who, like me, attended Elizabeth Warren’s Town Hall in Needham on August 30th and were excited about the work that our senator has been doing in Washington.
The central takeaway from the town hall? Warren is determined to help save our democracy. She believes we need 4 more justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. To get there, she is supporting key Democrats who are facing opposition for the next election and told the crowd that they needed to help keep the Senate and flip the House in 2024.
I asked a question about federal support for child care. Federal funding for the stabilization of child care is due to mostly run out on Sept. 30th of this year. I wanted to know if she thought that a new bill called the Child Care Stabilization Act might pass to keep as many as 70,000 child care programs across the country from shutting down. The short answer: she doesn’t think the Republicans will join Democrats to keep these programs operating. Millions of children are probably going to be without needed care this fall as a result. She vowed to keep pushing for a federal program that supports families. I mentioned the Massachusetts Common Start initiatives that promise to bridge the child care funding gap in our state as the federal funds dry up. Of course she is a fan!
When asked about her view of term limits, Senator Warren said she was not a supporter. She believes power is developed over time and good leaders would be forced to leave before they had time to accomplish the goals their constituents valued. She also stated that our elected officials in Washington need more money for staffing. While laughing, she recounted a time when another legislator mentioned to her that cryptocurrency sounded wonderful. This legislator was visited by convincing crypto lobbyists but didn’t have enough staff to research it within their own office. She said she needs more staff funding to expand her work in the Senate.
Some short takes:
- She supports Security and Exchange Commissioner Gary Gensler’s goal of having new private equity disclosure rules. She said that as many as 1 in 2 homes have been purchased with cash recently by private equity groups who held them back until the market was high and then unloaded them. This drives the housing market up and out of reach for many. She wants the Federal Government to contribute more money to bring home prices lower and increase supply.
- Senator Warren wants to ‘take on some of the structures which would be unpopular politically’ to create a more equitable healthcare system. For now, she is focused on decreasing the cost of drugs and managing private Medicare Advantage vendors who are ‘up-diagnosing’ to receive many millions of dollars of unfair higher payments from the Medicare program.
- When a concern over credit card practices was raised, Senator Warren encouraged anyone with a problem to register a complaint with the Federal Consumer Protection Agency. She said it is easy to register a complaint and that it is useful to the agency because they learn where problems are when they see clusters of complaints.
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