What no one explains is that this “shut up and sit down” Senate model is based on the not-unreasonable idea that new senators should develop some expertise in their area before they start making waves. But since Warren is one of the nation’s leading experts on banking and financial services, it’s absolutely silly to expect she wouldn’t use her expertise from Day One. And, as Sirota points out, it’s a double standard for progressives. Anyone telling Marco Rubio not to make waves? Via Raw Story:
Appearing with “The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur on Tuesday, author David Sirota critiqued Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) recent grilling of the nation’s top financial regulators, saying it’s the first evidence we’ve seen that Warren is showing no interest in “the Hillary Clinton model” of sitting down and shutting in hopes of earning the right to be taken seriously.
“What’s un-serious is the notion that a senator shouldn’t ask serious questions about the biggest financial meltdown in contemporary history,” he said.
“When it comes to Democratic senators, what you hear is, ‘Please follow the Hillary Clinton model,’ that’s what it’s basically called,” Sirota said. “Hillary Clinton came in and she had star power and she laid low and didn’t do very much. Same thing for Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate. The expectation, if not the mandate for liberal senators is, only can you be taken seriously if you follow this model that says essentially, sit down and shut up.”
Those were my sentiments exactly. No one tells Rand Paul to shut up and sit down, nor Marco Rubio, or Utah’s Mike Lee. Ted Cruz from Texas is getting heat, but only because he’s irritating his fellow Senators, not because of his paleoconservatism.