Quite a headline, I realize, and I won't even mention the screaming conflict between her status as a celebrated Social Justice Warrior and her decision to perpetrate a racial hoax -- whether through reckless sloppiness or willful intent -- in order to advance her own career. She was never a Native American, but nevertheless, she persisted in claiming that false origin story. Until she became a tenured professor at Harvard, that is. As I've discussed at greater length elsewhere, it turns out that celebrity leftists who violate certain lefty pieties are eligible for waivers to wash away their cultural appropriation and privilege-stealing sins. But we won't get into all of that right now. In this post, I'll focus on Sen. Warren's words versus deeds on two other fronts: Equal pay for women, and judicial filibusters. On the former issue, which is often distorted and exploited by Democrats for political gain, Warren has her outraged schtick down to a T. Feel the indignation course through your veins, Liz:
#EqualPayDay isn’t a national day of celebration. It’s a national day of embarrassment.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) April 12, 2016
A modest response from yours truly:
You paid women on your staff 71% of what the men made last year, based on your own party's demagogic standards: https://t.co/FbwEmPSCr9 https://t.co/x8cyYYcbuB
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) April 4, 2017
I got that data from a Washington Free Beacon review, which used the same parameters they've employed in exposing hypocrisy from the Obama White House and Hillary Clinton:
Women working for Warren were paid just 71 cents for every dollar paid to men during the 2016 fiscal year, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. The median annual earnings for women staffers, $52,750, was more than $20,000 less than the median annual earnings for men, $73,750, according to the analysis of publicly available Senate data. When calculated using average salaries rather than median, the pay gap expands to just over $26,051, or about 31 percent. Consistent with previous Free Beacon analyses of Senate salary data, only full-time staffers who were employed for the entire period in question were included in the calculations. For example, Warren's former chief of staff Mindy Myers and her male replacement Dan Geldon were not included because neither worked the full year. Among employees employed the entire year, only one woman, Warren's director of scheduling, earned a six-figure salary, at $100,624.88. Five men—Warren's director of oversight and investigations ($156,000), legislative director ($149,458), deputy chief of staff ($119,375), Massachusetts state director ($152,310), and deputy state director ($113,750)—earned more than Warren's highest paid woman staffer in 2016.
When such inconvenient truths are rudely noted by awful people, it's fascinating to watch liberals rediscover the nuances than lurk behind hiring and salary statistics. When a nuance-free blunt object is needed to make a clumsy and misleading political point, they're all about the crude calculations. When they're defending the actions of one of their own, context suddenly becomes more important. Meanwhile, Warren is predictably one of the most enthusiastic participants in the tactically-moronic filibuster of Neil Gorsuch. Because resist, etc. Republicans, she says, are "bullying" Democrats. But here is 2013's Elizabeth Warren, insisting that Democrats must change the Senate rules in the face of (non-historic, not-unprecedented) GOP tactics modeled after Democrats' previous obstructionist inventions:
She also suggested in 2012 that she'd favor nuking the filibuster more broadly, including on legislation, in order to stand up to the banks and oil companies, and other fill-in-the-bank ghouls. The ends always justify the means.
Editor's note: Though Ms. Warren's position on the filibuster appears to have bounced around from 2012 to 2013 to 2017, one factor that remained constant throughout those years -- and her entire life -- is her race. Warren is a white woman.
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