The Elizabeth Warren Congress?

Could the 120th sitting of the federal legislature come to be known as the Warren Congress? The Massachusetts Marxist, Senator Elizabeth Warren, is champing at the bit to enact liberal legislation on the economy. President Trump vows to don his veto hat to guard against the left’s excesses. Yet Ms. Warren is urging Mr. Trump to work with her on pseudo-populist proposals like a cap on credit card interest rates. “I got the bill. I’m ready to go,” she says.Mr. Trump would be wise to decline such entreaties to sign into law measures that encroach on the workings of the free market. That caution would apply whether the bills come from leftists like Ms. Warren or from the emerging so-called populist right of his own party. Mr. Trump has evinced some susceptibility to these ideas. Ms. Warren on Sunday pointed out that the president “himself said that he wants to reduce interest rates on credit cards to 10 percent.”Yet like any government attempt to set prices, capping credit card interest rates could backfire. “Price controls of all sorts are disastrous,” cautions economist Veronique de Rugy, whose column runs in the Sun. In recent months Ms. de Rugy has been warning about the risks of the neo-populist movement that has cropped up on the GOP’s right wing. Calls to restrict the fees or interest rates on credit cards, she warns, would hurt struggling Americans.Interest rates are high on credit cards, Ms. de Rugy asserts, because “unsecured consumer lending is very risky.” A high rate of interest reflects what she calls “the price for the lender taking a chance on a person.” If Mr. Trump were to sign into law a measure that “artificially caps rates far below the market rate,” she adds, “banks will stop lending to riskier borrowers.” That would harm “the working single parent using a financial last resort before payday.”The downside of such interference in the free market speaks to the broader flaws in the Democrats’ plans for affordability. A traditional GOP program of lower taxes, less spending, and reduced regulation — along with sound money — would fuel growth with low inflation. Liberals, and some on the populist right, instead focus on government interventions and redistributionist schemes to create the illusion of prosperity. Ms. Warren attributes her party’s midterm gains to the perception that Democrats, in her words, are “populist economic fighters.” She reckons that “working people are counting on us to deliver.” Ahead of a policy speech next week, she warns that it would be an error “if Democrats spend the next few years railing against Trump and waiting for some future Democratic trifecta before we deliver real change.” In short, she aspires to concrete legislative achievements.More’s the reason, then, for Mr. Trump to tread warily when it comes to cooperating with Ms. Warren’s liberal agenda. These columns urged this caution at the start of Mr. Trump’s term in an editorial headlined “Elizabeth Warren’s Siren Song.” At the time, the Bay State solon pledged that she was “ready to work with” the GOP on “policies that rebuild the middle class.” We warned Mr. Trump not “to embrace regulation and subsidies as policy tools.”There is, too, a class-warfare edge to Ms. Warren’s sunny platitudes. She next week “plans to mock,” the Times reports, those in her party “who are happy to have Democrats rail against billionaires at their rallies” but then “expect softer, more middle-of-the-road, corporate-friendly economic policies once in office.” Ms. Warren’s economic agenda risks defining the 120th Congress, unless Mr. Trump and his advisers see through her guise of moderation.

The Elizabeth Warren Congress?

The Elizabeth Warren Congress?

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