OUR VIEW: Warren is a national leader for Massachusetts

Elizabeth Warren has been a good U.S. senator.

True to her pledge to protect the interests of middle class consumers, she has been an advocate for young and working people and the immense financial challenges they face in an American economy that is increasingly divided into pure winners and pure losers.

Despite being a lightning rod for criticism from some conservative idealogues, in reality Warren has long demonstrated an ability to work across the aisle with Republican senators.

Warren made her reputation as a critic of Wall Street and in the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Obama administration. She has continued to be that consumer voice in the Senate, leading the charge against exploitive banks as when she held Wells Fargo executives responsible for assigning credit cards to customers who didn’t ask for them. She continues to be the leading Democratic voice in the country for the manipulation of the financial lives of the middle class.

Warren also took a leading role in the desperate situation many millenials face paying off student loans that in many cases are equal to the cost of a starter home. She has twice sponsored student loan legislation that would allow students with outstanding loan debt at high interest rates to refinance those loans at lower rates. That bill fell just short of attracting enough Republicans to pass. And none other than the real estate industry has now raised the alarm that housing sales will suffer unless some way is found to provide relief to young people overwhelmed by student loan debt.

Those who have tried to portray Warren as an extreme partisan might be surprised to know that she co-sponsored a successful bill with Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, certainly not a liberal senator, that will allow consumers to purchase hearing aids without going through a licensed audiologist. Backers say it will lower prices for hearing aids that have been too costly for many with mild to moderate hearing loss. The Senate passed the measure 94 to 1.

Republican senators Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida have all talked about bills they have co-sponsored with Warren.

Much has been made locally about Warren’s supposed invisibility on the issues important to the Greater New Bedford fishing industry. And while Warren may not be on the waterfront every week, she has taken important steps vital to the industry’s survival.

In 2013, the Senate passed Warren’s amendment to allow funds in the next year’s federal budget to help struggling fishermen. The measure was co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. It came after a federal disaster was declared in several fisheries where fishermen faced massive cuts in groundfish allocations that year.

Last year, Warren wrote to NOAA on behalf of New Bedford’s desire to keep the seized fishing permits of Carlos Rafael in the city after the groundfish and scallop fleet owner was convicted of falsifying his catches. The port of Gloucester is among those lobbying for some of the permits to be spread to other New England ports and Gov. Charlie Baker was among those who had called for the Rafael permits to be redistributed.

“I am urging you to do everything possible to ensure that those permits stay in the port of New Bedford,” Warren wrote Chris Oliver, NOAA’s assistant administrator for fisheries.

Warren has not been without her missteps. We are disappointed she keyed in to President Trump’s demeaning name-calling over her alleged Native American ancestry. Not only did it dignify a dubious charge, it impinged on what some Native American tribes said is their sole authority to decide who is a tribal member. It was unnecessary as independent assessments had already concluded Warren did not use her background to advance her career. But as we learned with Trump’s false claims that former President Obama was born in Kenya, no amount of proof will suffice for this kind of character assassination.

We are also disappointed that Warren, like Gov. Baker, chose not to come to SouthCoast to debate the local issues that are important to the region this year. She had said in the past that it is important to debate local issues close to the people they affect and we are not sure why that would have changed now that she is an incumbent.

Elizabeth Warren, however, has been a more than effective senator and like other Massachusetts senators before her — Edward Brooke, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry — she is a national figure who leads the country’s debates and commands the issues.

She is a senator the state can be proud of.

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