Consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren officially threw her hat into the Senate ring this morning, according to her spokesman, Kyle Sullivan.
Running as a first-time candidate and Democrat, the Harvard Law professor will be challenging Massachusetts Republican incumbent Scott Brown.
“The pressures on middle class families are worse than ever, but it is the big corporations that get their way in Washington,” Warren said in a statement. “I want to change that. I will work my heart out to earn the trust of the people of Massachusetts.”
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Warren is well known for being a critic of Wall Street, and was passed over to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB); the Obama administration appointed Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray instead.
The CFPB is a newly created federal agency, whose responsibility is to oversee financial consumer regulation and police predatory lending practices in the wake of the financial crisis.
Warren originally proposed the creation of a consumer agency in 2007, and was appointed as a special administration adviser last year to help launch it.
However, the very structure of the CFPB is under attack from the GOP, which views the agency as “too centralized” and sees the director's position as “too powerful.” In May, 44 Senate Republicans vowed to obstruct any nomination of a director, mounting enough support to maintain a successful filibuster of the issue.
Even though she has never run for office, Warren's support base is strong due to her hard-line advocacy of stringent Wall Street regulation.
She has already received fundraising support from groups such as EMILY's List and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and is currently traveling across the state to meet with voters and supporters.