United Liberty

Holly Robichaud of The Boston Herald is reporting that Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), U.S. Senate candidate and Lioness of Consumer Protection, may have helped Travelers Insurance cheat asbestos victims out of compensation. Robichaud writes:

One of the Harvard professor’s many well-com-pensated part-time gigs included consulting for Travelers Insurance. I know that it is hard to believe that on one hand, Democrats would be bashing an industry, and on the other hand they are making money from it. To be a Democrat is to be a hypocrite.

What did Lizzy do to earn $44,000 in compensation from the insurance company? She made it harder for claimants to collect. Warren helped establish the bankruptcy strategy for companies to avoid crushing lawsuits. In short, go bankrupt to avoid paying victims.

In court briefings, she supported the effort to protect Travelers Insurance from future lawsuits after agreeing to a $500 million settlement with asbestos plaintiffs.

This news should be greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism until more information becomes available. For example, it would be helpful to know in precisely what capacity Warren worked for Travelers. Robichaud’s rhetoric is beyond partisan even for an op-ed writer and at one point she refers to Brown’s 2010 opponent Martha Coakley as Marsha. So our readers should take these accusations with a grain of salt until we see some less biased reporting.

If true, though, nobody should be particularly surprised. The congressional culture of corruption and hypocrisy is nothing new. Former Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) were the architects of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, insisting that Americans needed protection from those big, nasty banks. Yet Dodd was implicated in the Countrywide VIP mortgage scandal and Frank faced allegations of his own regarding his role in the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now Dodd is busy working for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to undermine our First Amendment rights and destroy the free internet. So if Warren really is the epic hypocrite that Robichaud makes her out to be, she should fit right in on Capitol Hill if she’s able to unseat Brown in November.