Talk about sore losers.
Massachusetts Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey must have missed the results of November’s election.
Otherwise, they would not still be campaigning against Republican Donald Trump, the next president.
They really know who won, but being the core progressive partisans that they are, they are having difficulty accepting the results of Trump’s landslide victory over the hapless Vice President Kamala Harris.
Which is why — to the potential detriment of the state — they are still attacking Trump and his cabinet appointees at every opportunity.
In doing so they risk not only further alienating Trump but turning off the scores of Trump appointees who dole out federal funds and grants to the states.
Not only are billions of dollars for the two fundamentally obsolete Cape Cod bridges — the Sagamore and the Bourne — at stake under a Trump administration, but Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is also facing the chopping block.
The creation of the agency under President Barack Obama, which oversees and regulates financial institutions, was Warren’s singular accomplishment since she had been in public life.
The agency, which critics accuse of overregulation and duplication, is earmarked for extinction under the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. It is headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and its mission is to cut waste and streamline the federal bureaucracy.
“Delete CFPB,” Musk wrote on X. “There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.”
The agency employs some 1,700 people, most of whom work from home, and earn an average of $184,000 a year.
While the future of CFPB did not come up during a Sunday softball interview with Warren on WCVB TV’s “On the Record,” the fate of the bridges and Trump’s potential payback did.
Warren said that the idea of retribution from Trump because Massachusetts voted for Harris was “corruption.”
While Trump has yet to be sworn in as president, Warren said, “The idea that what will happen in a Trump administration…simply because we are a blue state, I think it really tells us of a level of corruption.”
She said, “It’s another form of corruption — it’s about a political corruption that infects this administration and troubles me deeply,”
And, by the way, she will also be voting against Pete Hegseth for defense secretary too. “This man is not qualified; he’s disqualified,” she said.
Not to be outdone, Markey in an email fundraising effort, went after Trump’s cabinet nominees too, charging that the cabinet was “shaping up to be filled with conspiracy theorists and fringe, unqualified figures.”
Among them, Markey said, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, Markey said, “may be one of the most dangerous among them.”
“I’m absolutely going to vote no” on his confirmation, Markey said, as he asked in his email for a $5 campaign contribution to help him “gear up for the important fights ahead.”
The HHS budget is huge. In 2024 HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra oversaw the spending of $1.7 trillion on mandatory programs along with another $145 billion in discretionary spending.
That discretionary spending goes to social welfare programs like early core education, children and family well-being programs, mental health, food and food stamp programs, and so on.
As Warren and Markey were again on the attack last week, HHS released the initial $3.7 billion in funding for its Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, $144 million of which is expected to come to Massachusetts.
The money pays as much as $1,050 in fuel assistance for eligible households.
Would that appropriation — as well as others, like for the bridges— be in danger when Trump is president and Kennedy is head of HHS? Perhaps not.
But it would be helpful for Massachusetts if Warren and Markey toned down their tantrum over the election. Calling Trump and Kennedy names is stupid.
Trump won; you lost. Get over it.
Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com
