Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren, née Elizabeth Herring   (born June 22, 1949, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma), American legal scholar, technocrat, and politician who chaired the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), engineered the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and ran as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate, representing Massachusetts, in 2012.

Warren grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, where her father worked mainly as a maintenance man and her mother did catalog-order work. After her father suffered a heart attack, the family struggled economically, and Warren began waiting tables at age 13. At age 16 she earned a debate scholarship and attended George Washington University, Washington, D.C., though she graduated from the University of Houston (B.S. in speech pathology, 1970) after having married her high-school sweetheart, mathematician Jim Warren, at age 19 and moved to Texas. They had two children but divorced in 1978. After she worked as a special education teacher, she earned (1976) a law degree from Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, practiced out of her living room, and then embarked on a career as a law-school professor that eventually took her to Harvard University. Along the way, she became an expert on bankruptcy law. In 1980 Warren married Harvard legal scholar Bruce Mann.

As the author or coauthor of nine books, including The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (2000) and The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (2003), Warren testified before congressional committees. It was as the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP, the body authorized under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act to rescue foundering American financial institutions in 2008, that Warren became a national figure. She then championed the creation of the CFPB, which was established under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. As interim director, Warren structured and staffed the bureau tasked with protecting people from financial fraud and chicanery, but she was not nominated as its permanent head by Pres. Barack Obama, who, according to some , feared that Republicans would block her appointment. Nevertheless, Warren had become a populist bellwether and a liberal icon, celebrated by talk-show hosts Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, on whose programs she appeared.

In 2011 Warren began seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat long held by Ted Kennedy before his death.. She captured nearly 96 percent of the votes at the party’s state convention and thereby avoided a primary election. Like her Republican opponent, incumbent Scott Brown, who had won the special election to replace Kennedy, Warren campaigned as a defender of the embattled middle class. She confounded accusations of Harvard elitism with her down-to-earth personality and argued the benefits of good government, confronting Brown’s advocacy of rugged individualism with her contention that every entrepreneur had benefited from public works and from employees well educated in public schools. After Warren was accused of having misrepresented herself as being of partly Native American descent (which she could not formally document), she explained that her identification as partly Cherokee and Delaware came by way of family stories.