Abouta at an Event Campaign finance. [applause] i dont think i need this microphone. Fork you for coming, braving the cold. I think it is one degree outside. So, we are really excited to have six of the candidates in conversation with us. Joining us will be on livestream. The way this is going to work is the candidates will be coming out, speaking for a couple of minutes about plans to fix democracy, kevin and i will be asking them questions, then we will take questions from the audience. React toage you to things. Please be respectful. Haggling, protesting, no rushing the stage please. I would like to first introduce senator Elizabeth Warren, our first speaker. [applause] they just use your mind and they never give you credit, its enough to drive you crazy if you let it. Sen. Warren thank you. I think the single biggest question we face now and in america is who this government is going to work for. For decades, our government has worked better and better and better for a smaller and Smaller Group at the top. And worse and worse and worse for everyone else. When you have a government that works great for those with money, and not so great for everyone else, that is corruption pure and simple and we need to call it out for what it is. [applause] sen. Warren understand this. It is going on right now in the primaries. We have billionaires who think they can just buy an election. Case in point, Michael Bloomberg, has already dropped 200 Million Dollars to make his voice heard and drown out every other voice in this democratic primary. Think about what that means . And he plans to skip the democracy part of the election. That is coming to places like iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and nevada and meeting people. Instead, it is all going to be set up for tv, running tbs to make it work. Running tv ads to make it work. And he has applied to the federal Election Commission to delay making his federally required financial disclosures. When does he want to delay it to . Until after super tuesday and we have very possibly picked our candidate by then. Think about that. If he has serious conflict of interests, business interests in other parts of the world or other corporations, when are we going to know about that . Not until after super tuesday. That is not how democracy is supposed to work and we need to shut that down. [applause] i am so glad to be here with all of you, because to me, this is our big chance in 2020, to build a Grassroots Movement, to make our voices heard across this nation, to say we do not want to government that just works for billionaires. We do not want to government that just works for giant corporations. Or just works for corporate executives. We want a government that works for the people. That is what democracy is about, and that is what we can do in 2020. Thank you all, thank you, thank you. [applause] sen. Warren alrighty. Lets do this. [laughter] kevin so, senator, you just talked about Michael Bloomberg. He spent a lot of time during this campaign decrying out size influence billionaires like Michael Bloomberg have on this process. Bloomberg has also said he will keep spending huge sums of money to support whoever the democratic nominee for president is. If you are that nominee, do you want his help, do you want his support or would you discourage him from spending that . Sen. Warren no, look, Michael Bloomberg wants to come in on issues, good for him. He wants to put money into getting a democrat elected, good for him. But understand this, i do not sell access to my time. I do not spend time sucking up to billionaires. [applause] i am just not there. So people want to make a contribution, thats great. But i am going to keep fighting the fight i am fighting. And that is a fight to make this government, to make this democracy work. Not just for a thinner and thinner slice of the top, to make it work for everyone. That is why i am here. Amanda Michael Bloomberg has given a lot of money to various groups over the years, to fill some of those folks may be endorsing him because he has bought their endorsement from support over the years . Sen. Warren i cannot know what is in their heads but what i can tell you is that money talks. And it talks over and over and over. You know how i know that . I watch it in washington. In every campaign. Understand this, when i made the decision to run for president , i knew what i would be fighting for. It is the same thing i have been fighting for all my life, for hardworking families that just keep getting the short end of the stick over and over. I knew the fight i would be in. But for me was important not just what i was fighting for but how i was fighting. So i talked to folks. There are people who are experts about getting people elected to big offices include president. And they came to see me. They said, heres how you do it. You go spend a huge amount of your time vacuuming up as much money from big dollar donors as you can all around the country. You get bundlers who are people who gather money from others and they get access to you, they promise in your name more access. They identify where this money is coming from, which industry, which interest. You gather up all that money. You make a few guest appearances in the early stage, you get your picture taken and then you run a bunch of tv ads. That is basic how works. And to meet that is the ultimate statement of what is broken in our democracy. The ultimate statement of why, for decades now, this country has worked better and better and better for those at the top. When i say better and better and better, think of the examples. Amazon, chevron, eli lilly reported billions of dollars in profits last year. How much did they pay in taxes . Zero. Zero. If you paid a dollar in taxes last year, you paid more than these corporations that reported billions of dollars in profits. How does that happen . Because of loopholes in the system. How did the loopholes get there . It is not like they are motheaten loopholes. [applause] [laughter] they did not happen as an act of nature. They happened because people kept putting money into the system. Money in Campaign Contributions. Money in lobbying. Money in bought and paid for experts. Pr firms. Money in tilted think tanks. Money, money, money. So i decided im not doing it that way. I said im going to find this thing entirely grassroots. And i am not going to my time. The consequence has been, a lot more time to be able to go do town halls. It also means building a Grassroots Movement. Because this is our only chance. We are going to be up against billionaires who are reaching their own candidates or candidates who have been selected by billionaires. The only way we fight back against that is we have got to do this with a Grassroots Movement across this country that says, we are going to make democracy work not for those at the top, we are going to make or make it work for all of us. [applause] amanda so i want to ask you a bit about judges. Trump has remade the federal judiciary, i think he has had almost 200 judges confirmed with the help of Mitch Mcconnell. Part of the way his been able to do that, a lot of these people have extreme positions, have been rated not qualified by the american bar association. He has been able to do this in part because he has flouted a tradition known as blue slips. Home state senators traditionally get approval or veto power over a judge that comes from their state. Trump has not followed that tradition. As president , would you follow the blue slip tradition . Sen. Warren you know i watched this on both sides. President obama honored the blue slip tradition, which meant in states that had two republicans, he could not come up with the nominee. In a few cases. Their view was keep this open until we get republican sitting in the white house and then because it will be open, we will be able to get more republicans on the bench. So they played blue slip game from one direction when there was a democrat in the white house and now that there is a republican in the white house, they play at the other direction and that is they have tossed the blue slip outcome as you say exactly and they named whoever they want to name. Heres a problem we have got about the judiciary. The answer cannot be, that when we get a democrat back in the white house, which is going to happen in january, 2021 [applause] sen. Warren we cannot work to make our judiciary more politicized. That cannot be the right answer. We can have a debate about whether or not blue slips make it more politicized or less politicized. And for that i think theres evidence going both ways. I do not think the blue slip is at the heart of it. I think what is at the heart of it is who you asked to be a judge, who you want on your list to be a judge. And i will tell you what the answers been for donald trump because ive seen this guy. Homophobic, that is in. Racist, that is in. Sexist, oh yeah, most definitely. And, antivoter. That has been a big qualification. He has named one person after another who and i do not mean we have kind of a sense that that is who those people are i mean look at the written records. Look at the activities they have already engaged in. Look at the fights they have been in and which side they were on. Our answer has to be that we have a judiciary that truly respects the rule of law. And respects every single human being in this country. That is the job of the judiciary. It is there to protect individual rights. It is not there to protect corporate rights. It is not there to protect the folks with money. It is there to protect individual rights. And i had the honor, as a baby senator, and i mean a baby senator, i had been elected, sworn in and then john kerry left to become secretary of state, it took me 15 minutes to become the senior senator from the commonwealth of massachusetts. [laughter] sen. Warren i had the honor to be able to recommend to barack obama, people to fill the vacancies we had in massachusetts. And for me, what was key on this were people who came from different backgrounds. People who had different experiences in the legal system. So the very first person i was able to nominate, a woman named indira talwani, who represented workers, who represented people who did not have much money, who saw the legal system not just from the side of giant corporate practice but who sought from the side of people who turned to the courts because they needed help. That is the kind of people i want to see on the bench. And i want to see us restore a bench where everybody no matter what Political Party you are in, no matter who you are, if you come in front of one of our federal benches, you have complete confidence that the people who are sitting on this bench are there to uphold the rule of law. And treat you with respect. [applause] amanda i want to get to an audience question but first want to go back to my blue slip question. If you go at put forth somebody meet your qualifications but republican home state senator jack set nominee would you pull back the nominee or go forward . Sen. Warren i want to see how it plays out. If it happens once, its different than if its an organized plan to try to block everyone who comes through from a democratic nominee. Im not going to play this game the other way either. Im not going to be the democrat assess if the democrats are the white house will play by the nice rules and when republicans are the white house we all play for the dirty rules. I am not playing that game. But i will give them a chance to at least join us in having a government that works again and a judicial pointman process that works again. [applause] amanda we are going to mark collins, who is an advocate, gun owner and a gun violence survivor. Sen. Warren hi, mark. Thank you for being here. I am a gun owner and someone who was previously impacted by gun violence. 20 years ago three of my coworkers were gunned down during a robbery. It affected my desk during a robbery. It affected our community. Theres a chilling parallel between a lot of those communities and those who are just proportionately underserved , often urban communities, often majority minority communities. You see the stories all the time, voter rolls are purged, partisan gerrymandering is enacted and entire communities are effectively silenced. Even universal background checks which has 95 approval across the country cannot get a vote in the u. S. Senate. How would you as president ensure these three needs are heard and that issues that confront them from Voter Suppression to gun violence are addressed in a way that includes their voices . Sen. Warren thank you. We have a gun violence in this gun violence problem in this country. It is about Mass Shootings and shootings that take place everyday and sidewalks and backyards and on street corners and disproportionally affect communities of color. It is also about suicide at and domestic violence. And the increased that woman will end up dead if she is in the house with an abuser who also has a gun. Reasonable background checks, getting assault weapons off our streets, strong public support. More than 90 in most of the polls i have seen including gun owners, including members of the nra. And yet in United States senate, we cannot even get a vote. Why not . Because of corruption. Who is calling the shots in the United States senate on guns . The gun industry. The gun industry, their money, and they are in league nra. We have to be willing to stand up against that. How do we do that . Part of it is something a president can do all by herself. [laughter] sen. Warren that is, we need an attorney general, we need a department of justice, that is willing to enforce our civil rights laws. That is willing to enforce the voter laws that we still have on the books. That is willing to go after white supremacists. That is willing to get in the fight against those who would undermine the rights of people in this country, and particularly undermine the rights of people of color. That is part of what we can do. We can have the right attorney general and the right department of justice. But i want to add another piece to this. When we think about what we need to do in washington, in congress, in the senate. We need to make changes in the laws. Exactly the ones you identified. Theres a lot we can do on her on our own but theres a lot that has to go to the senate. Think about this aspect of it. We need to reform the rules in the senate and get rid of the filibuster. As long as we have a filibuster in the United States senate, that means it is going to be a 60 vote threshold for anything we want to get done and that effectively means that the gun industry has veto. The same way the pharmaceutical industry has a veto, the same way the oil industry has a veto. One powerful lobby after another has a veto. You know how i know this one in particular . I was on the senate floor in 2013, when we passed some sensible Gun Legislation and what happened . We got 54 votes, i think. And in a body with a hundred people, 54 votes was not enough. It would not carry us through because of the filibuster. And understand, this is a big issue that divides the Democratic Candidates for president right now. If anyone comes in and talks to you about how important it is to them to have real reform, real reform on guns, where you see such an active industry. Real reform on health care, real reform on Student Loan Debt. Real reform on climate. And yet is not willing to take on the filibuster . Then they will not make real change. Because you kept the threshold too high. So i believe to get something done, to get the kind of fighting back against monied interest, we need to repeal the filibuster. It is time to get rid of the filibuster. [applause] sen. Warren those are two ways we can push back on this one. Amanda now we have mary from des moines who has worked in health care for 27 years. Hi, senator warren. Sen. Warren hi, mary. Donald trump spent his presidency making clear he believes he is above the law. Sen. Warren i have noticed that. [laughter] and that the constitution does not apply to him. His crimes have led to his impeachment. What would you do on day one to improve our system of democracy to demonstrate your administration will be different. Sen. Warren so, thank you. Actually i will talk about the same thing i start with on guns. We did the things we can do by ourselves. When you start on day one. That means an attorney general who is there to enforce the law. It means a department of justice with a real and functioning civil rights division. That is how we show the kind of difference we want to make. The second one, did anyone ever take a close look at who are the ambassadors who represent you around the world . Yeah. In some countries, they really are part of our diplomatic corps. You want to make sure you acknowledge that. But how did the current ambassador to the eu, sondland, you have seen him, right . He has been in the news lately. What qualified him to be the ambassador to the eu . This is a serious post, right . How did he qualify . He made a Million Dollar contribution to Donald Trumps inauguration effort. A million bucks evidently bought somebody an ambassadors post. That is something we can address right now in the democratic primary. I said on this one, quite publicly, quite anybody who wants to contribute to my campaign, have at it, thank you very much. Im not selling access to my time but if you want to contribute, good for you. Understand this. You make contribution to my campaign, i will not consider you for ambassador anywhere. Ambassadorships should not be for sale. They should go to people who are qualified, who know something about the area, to people who have worked for our state department. That is how we should run our government. When we sell ambassadorships to big donors, it is just one more way to say to all of the American People, rich people are different from you, they get different access in government, they get different ownership of government. I have made this commitment on ambassadorships. Ive asked everyone else, all of the other