The Caucus | Elizabeth Warren: 'I Accept'
Elizabeth Warren: 'I Accept'
By Maria Newman
September 17, 2010 7:16 am September 17, 2010 7:16 am
President Obama is expected to announce in a Rose Garden ceremony Friday afternoon that he is appointing Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as his assistant. But hours before the formal announcement, Ms. Warren issued a folksy message on the White House Blog about why she is taking on the job.
"The President asked me, and I enthusiastically agreed, to serve as an Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau," Ms. Warren wrote. Then she added, perhaps in a veiled reference to the president's decision to appoint her as his assistant now, rather than going through what could be a lengthy Senate confirmation process: "He has also asked me to take on the job to get the new C.F.P.B. started — right now."
The bureau, she says, "can go a long way toward repairing a gaping hole in the budgets of millions of families."
It is, she says, "based on a pretty simple idea: people ought to be able to read their credit card and mortgage contracts and know the deal. They shouldn't learn about an unfair rule or practice only when it bites them — way too late for them to do anything about it. The new law creates a chance to put a tough cop on the beat and provide real accountability and oversight of the consumer credit market. The time for hiding tricks and traps in the fine print is over."
She finished with a story about her grandmother, Hannie Reed, who at age 16 drove a wagon in the Oklahoma land rush.
"Her mother had died, so she was up front with her little brothers and sisters bouncing around in the back," Ms. Warren wrote. "When I was growing up, she talked about life on the prairie, about marrying my grandfather and making a living building one-room schoolhouses, about getting wiped out in the Great Depression. She was hit with hard challenges throughout her life, but the moral of her stories was always the same: she would solve her problems one at a time by pulling up her socks and getting to work.
"It's time for all of us to pull up our socks and get to work," she wrote.
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