Elizabeth Warren Has Another Registration Card to Explain: She Was a Republican Until 1996
Massachusetts Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren faces renewed controversy over her 1986 Texas State Bar registration card, but there’s another more recent Warren registration ID that hasn’t gotten nearly enough scrutiny: her Republican voter registration.
On Tuesday, The Washington Post published a copy of Warren’s handwritten 1986 Texas State Bar registration card, on which “American Indian” was written in the space for “Race.” According to the paper, Warren’s office did not dispute its authenticity. This revelation follows a series of events that led Warren to apologize to the Cherokee Nation for taking Donald Trump‘s dare to prove her Native American ancestry with a DNA test.
Is it fair that this controversy threatens to dog Warren out of the presidential race before it really begins, even as Trump has waged a despicable campaign of racist slurs over the issue with little or no consequences? Definitely not.
That issue notwithstanding, Warren has never fully explained her Republican-American background either.
In a 2014 interview on ABC News’ This Week with George Stephanopoulos, host George Stephanopoulos said to Warren “it might surprise a lot of your supporters to know that you were a registered Republican as recently as 1996,” and asked, “What drew you to the GOP and why did you leave?”
“I was with the GOP for a while because I really thought that it was a party that was principled in its conservative approach to economics and to markets,” Warren said. “And I feel like the GOP party just left that.”
“They moved to a party that said, ‘No, it’s not about a level playing field. It’s now about a field that’s gotten tilted,'” Warren added. “And they really stood up for the big financial institutions when the big financial institutions are just hammering middle class American families. I just feel like that’s a party that moved way, way away.”
To be clear, Warren was with the GOP until she was almost twenty years older than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now. And the story of her “evolution” has changed significantly over the years.
In an interview last year, Warren claimed that she was a registered independent until she registered as a Republican in 1987, and insisted that she voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980, and did not say if she voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984.
In 2011, though, Warren made no mention of being an independent when she told The Daily Beast that she was a Republican until she was 46 years old. And when they asked if she had voted for Reagan, Warren replied “I’m not going to talk about who I voted for.”
There are two things that are particularly disturbing about Warren’s tenure as a registered Republican, aside from the evolving details of her account of it. Warren remained a member of, or joined the party after, decades of a racist southern strategy that Ronald Reagan gleefully exploited, through the Willie Horton/ Jesse Helms “white hands” era, and right on through the Clinton administration’s push to pass universal health care.
At a time when Democratic politicians are (often fairly) held to account for having supported problematic Democratic policies during that time period, Warren has never sufficiently accounted for her support of even more onerous Republican policies that harmed minorities and other vulnerable Americans.
But perhaps worse than that is that in explaining her pivot to the Democrats, Warren never mentions any of those things. And no one has ever asked her to explain how she could remain a member of a party that nakedly exploited racism, fought against equality for all kinds of people, and prevented every American from having access to health care.
If Elizabeth Warren is able to weather this most recent controversy, I look forward to finding out.
Watch the clip above, via ABC.
[Featured image via screengrab]
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
