When Senator Kristen Gillibrand announced she was running for president in 2020, CNBC reported that the Senator reached "out to Wall Street executives to gauge potential support" if she were to run.
According to CNBC, Gillibrand herself was "working the phones and calling senior executives," to see if they would back her, and as CNBC noted, "donors in the financial community helped back Gillibrand's successful re-election bid," during the 2018 midterms.
Journalist Dave Sirota tweeted, "This seems important," regarding the CNBC report.
Gillibrand responded:
That led Sirota to ask the Senator why she helped Republicans prevent a bill from passing that would have broken up the big banks:
CommonDreams notes that Gillibrand didn't respond to Sirota's question, but they also point out some progressive policies that Gillibrand supports.
Good aspects of Gillibrand per CommonDreams: "She (Gillibrand) has also staked out serious and far-reaching positions on women's equality, backed the demand for Medicare for All, supported legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, and signed a pledge not to take fossil fuel industry money during her campaign."
Unfortunately, Gillibrand has positions that will likely make progressive policies nearly impossible to pass the Senate.
“I think it’s useful to bring people together," Gillibrand told "Pod Save America" host Jon Favreau, when he asked her if she would get rid of the filibuster in order to pass progressive policies, like The Green New Deal. "And I don’t mind that you have to get 60 votes," to get legislation passed in the Senate.
Gillibrand went on to say that, "if you’re not able to get 60 votes on something, it just means you haven’t worked hard enough, talking to enough people and trying to listen to their concerns and then coming up with a solution that they can support. And so I’m not afraid of it one way or the other.”
"In short," writes Ryan Grimm for The Intercept, "Gillibrand’s argument is that if advocacy groups and their allies in Congress can’t produce 60 votes for a bill, that’s because they haven’t done enough to convince people that it’s good policy.
Grimm continues (emphasis mine): "That’s a romantic vision for government, but it doesn’t align with the reality of a partisan Senate in the 21st century. Republican senators — and, indeed, no small number of Democrats — are not in opposition to a Green New Deal or “Medicare for All” simply because they haven’t debated them enough or thought them through. Entrenched interests are fundamentally opposed to those policies, and come a Democratic majority, they will use their influence to keep the Senate short of the 60-vote threshold. And then there is the GOP’s partisan interest in simply making sure that Democrats can’t enact an agenda."
As Grimm has laid out, it's going to be hard for progressive's to pass legislation they support, and the filibuster will make it that much harder to get those policies implemented.
The Senator is essentially telling progressives that a vote for her, is a defeat for progressive policies.
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