Hillary Clinton’s uncomfortableness with the questioning was apparent
Hillary Clinton seemed very uncomfortable as old Clinton protege George Stephanopoulos questioned her about Elizabeth Warren’s Wall Street critique of her. Her spin on the issue is not corroborated as Stephanopoulos points out from Elizabeth Warren’s book,
“The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke.”
George Stephanopoulos: You challenged him to come up with evidence that contributions from Wall Street ever influenced your positions. He and his team have circulated the charge from Elizabeth Warren, who said you changed your position on the bankruptcy bill back in 2001 because of contributions. Here’s what Senator Warren had to say.
Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) Video Clip: One of the first bills that came up after she was Senator Clinton was the bankruptcy bill. … She voted in favor of it. She has taken money from the groups. And more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency.
George Stephanopoulos: How do you respond to that charge?
Hillary Clinton: Well, I’m glad you asked me about it, because this is one of these, you know, innuendo insinuation charges that the Sanders campaign is engaging in.
George Stephanopoulos: Well, that was Senator Warren, though.
Hillary Clinton: If you — no, but — but I know. But if you had played the entire quote, you know, what you would have heard her say, she and I worked together in 2000 to stop a bankruptcy bill that we both believed was very harmful. When I got to the Senate in 2001, one of the first big votes there was on a version of the bankruptcy bill and I was deluged by women’s groups and children’s advocates groups to do everything I could to make sure that child support and women’s precarious financial situation in case of divorce or not being able to get the kind of funding they needed from a partner or a spouse in bankruptcy would not be endangered. And it was. The current — that bill was making it a very low priority. So I did go to work on behalf of all these women’s groups and children’s groups because they needed a champion. …
George Stephanopoulos: But in her book, Senator Warren said the bill was essentially the same but Hillary Clinton — Hillary Rodham Clinton was not. Big banks were now part of Secretary Clinton’s consistency. She wanted their support. They wanted hers, including including a vote in favor of the bill.
CLINTON: George, look, I — look, I have the greatest — I have the greatest respect for Senator Warren. As I said, we did work together. I faced a choice. I could have said to the women who have been my advocates for 30 years, I’m sorry; I’m now in the Senate. But you know, I can’t help you. Nobody else is helping them. They were desperate to get help. They were afraid that child support was going to be below credit card debt, that they were going to be really left out and left behind and badly damaged. I could have said, you know, I can’t do that because somebody in 10 years might say that, you know, something else is going on. That’s not the way I work. So they came to me; I said this is outrageous. I went to the floor. I lobbied to get a change. And as part of getting that change from both Democrats and Republicans, who were leading that legislation, they said if we change this bill at the last minute to take account of these issues you’re raising about women and children, which they had not clearly made a priority before I showed up, then you know, you have to say you’ll vote for it. It was — you know, look, that’s what you have to do. I swallowed hard; I said OK. But it was also the case it didn’t get passed. So I got what I needed into the bill. It stayed in the bill, even in the bad version that I posed in 2005. So thanks for the opportunity to set the record straight.
Viewers are encouraged to subscribe and join the conversation for more insightful commentary and to support progressive messages. Together, we can populate the internet with progressive messages that represent the true aspirations of most Americans.
