Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Thursday that society has been so fundamentally altered by the challenges of a botched federal response to the coronavirus pandemic and racial justice reckoning over the summer, that the election may open the door to the big structural change she called for during her presidential run.
"I think now — in a post-Trump, post-COVID, post-economic collapse from COVID, post-racial reckoning from this past summer — that the door is open much wider than it has been any time since [the] mid-1960s," Warren told Boston Public Radio. "Maybe you’d have to go back to the Great Depression to find a time when the conditions were right to make structural change."
Warren said her top priority is getting President Donald Trump out of the White House, and electing former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump is not only a threat to people's lives due to his response to COVID-19, she said, but also to democracy, citing his refusal to say whether he'll commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election.
A former candidate for the highest executive job herself, Warren, a progressive, said that the more moderate Biden has "made clear" he understands this moment.
"The world as it was in the middle of our Democratic primaries ... is not today's world," she said. "Joe has embraced not just protecting the Affordable Care Act, but expanding it; cancelling student loan debt; $2 trillion on climate; and working with our neighbors around the world."
Warren said she hopes the election will bring power back to Democrats in the executive branch, as the Supreme Court has solidified a 6-3 conservative majority.
"If the Democrats have the White House, the Senate, and the House, now we can move to take care of a lot of things by statute," Warren said, pointing to cancelling student loan debt, protecting health care, and codifying reproductive rights instead of relying on the Supreme Court to do so.
"Roe v. Wade has been the law of the land through the Court, but it can also be law of the land through statute," said Warren.
Warren said at first, she wasn't sold on Biden's slogan to "build back better." But on Thursday, she said that it reflects how "Trump has broken things — but we're not just trying to get it back to even. We have to do a lot better."
