Warren wrote scathingly of Biden at Harvard Law

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote scathingly of Vice President Biden while she was on the faculty of Harvard Law School, mocking his White House ambitions while slamming his support for a bankruptcy bill that she said “hurts women.”

“With his presidential aspirations growing, Senator Biden must be delighted … with the halo effect that suggests that he is one public official politically active women can trust,” Warren wrote in a 2002 Harvard Women’s Law Journal article.

{mosads}Biden recently met with Warren — seen by many as wielding a powerful endorsement in the Democratic primary race — as he considers launching a presidential campaign.

Warren, who was elected to the Senate in 2012, has become a leading voice for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. In 2002, years before her political career began, she criticized then-Sen. Biden (Del.) as siding with big credit card companies over working-class women in the debate on bankruptcy reform.

“The group that will be most affected by the changes in the bankruptcy legislation Senator Biden so forcefully supports will be women, particularly women heads of household who are supporting children,” Warren wrote.

“Not a single women’s group that has spoken publicly about the bankruptcy bill agrees with him, but his public position as a champion of women seems untarnished,” she continued.

The International Business Times first reported on Warren’s criticism of Biden in the law journal.

Warren also questioned at the time whether Biden believed women were financially literate enough to understand what was in their interest.



“On financial topics, are women, as his words seem to suggest, unable to understand what helps them or hurts them?” she asked.

 “Why isn’t Senator Biden in trouble with grassroots women’s groups all over the country and with the millions of women whose lives will be directly affected by the legislation he sponsors?”

In a 2003 book, co-authored with her daughter, Warren also wrote that “[s]enators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening.”

The bankruptcy reform Biden advocated for was eventually signed into law in 2005 by President George W. Bush.

In a statement to IBTimes, a Biden aide said “the vice president has been a champion for middle-class families and has fought against powerful interests.”

Warren has not endorsed a candidate in the 2016 Democratic primary. Her Senate office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Biden ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1998 and 2008.