Warren pans Republican rule

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) blasted the new Republican Congress on Tuesday, arguing they are risking a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at a time when the middle class is getting “hammered.”

Warren made the remarks during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” with Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), where they announced a new political partnership to examine economic policies to address income inequality, among other issues.

{mosads}”Republicans are now in charge and what have they spent their time on? First, they wanted to spend weeks on a pipeline that would principally benefit some foreign oil company, and now they want to spend a month on shutting down Homeland Security at a time when we face terrorist threats,” Warren said.

Lawmakers must pass a DHS funding bill by Friday at midnight or the department and its associated agencies will partially shut down. Republicans are divided about whether to approve a “clean” DHS funding bill, as Democrats are demanding, or hold firm in using the bill to roll back President Obama’s executive action on immigration.

Later Tuesday, Warren and Cummings hosted a panel on Capitol Hill where they heard from politically friendly economists, including Jared Bernstein, former economic adviser to Vice President Biden.

“Is this class warfare when you try to address these kinds of issues?” Cummings asked.

“When someone makes the accusation of class warfare — if that person that makes the accusation is in the class that’s winning, you should probably discount it,” Bernstein said.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who was also at forum, said that the new Congress is “tone-deaf.”

“Here in Washington, we’re facing a tone-deaf Republican majority who has not only overlooked this problem, but has failed to present ideas that will actually solve it,” she said.

Warren and Cummings also wrote an op-ed in USA Today published on Tuesday, where they said that “powerful interest groups, massive corporations and the super-rich rigged the system to jack up their profits and grab the spoils for themselves.”