Elizabeth Warren during an event in February at the National Press Club in Washington. (AP photo)
BOSTON – U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the senior senator from Massachusetts, kept up her attacks on Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, declaring on Monday that he’s a product of “extremism” fomented by her GOP Senate colleagues.
On Saturday, Warren blasted the former reality television star at the state Democratic convention in Lowell. “Here’s a man who builds a business to profit off other peoples’ pain,” Warren said to cheers, according to the State House News Service. “He wants to be Commander in Chief, but he’s only qualified to be Fraudster-in-Chief.”
In a report that purports to show the extent to which Republicans have gone to block President Barack Obama’s nominations to fill judicial roles as well as key positions in the federal bureaucracy, Warren said on Monday that GOP leaders have taken every opportunity to hamstring the administration. And she said their actions have inspired some of Trump’s incendiary rhetoric.
“This refusal to carry out the basic tasks of government – including the timely confirmation of public servants – has created a breeding ground for new and dangerous Republican extremism,” Warren says in the report. On twitter later Monday, she made clear who she was referring to:
The GOP says if gov isn’t working for them & their rich buddies, they won’t let it work for anyone. That extremism got us @realDonaldTrump.
But her accusation drew immediate criticism from Twitter users, many of whom challenged her party’s front-running presidential contender, Hillary Clinton, as little different than Trump.
“Hillary is no different! She’s part of the problem,” said one, identifying herself as Iliana Sontag.
“So how do you explain HRC? Worse than Trump in every way and the darling of YOUR party, #SenatorSellout. Thanks for nothing,” opined another, listing himself as Calibernication.
“The establishment got us 8 years of stagnation and $19.9T in debt…”rich buddies” are in both parties,” said another, calling himself Ranger Hondo.
Warren accused the Senate GOP leaders of preventing the upper chamber from doing its job to give presidential nominees a hearing and an up or down vote, a charge she and other Democrats have made repeatedly:
Gov is supposed to work for all of us. But when it comes to making sure courts & watchdogs are staffed, @SenateGOP refuse to do their jobs.
“By advancing the idea that Senators sworn to uphold the Constitution can simply decide not to do their job for political reasons, they encourage ever more outrageous behavior from other Republican leaders,” Warren said in the report. The tenured Harvard Law professor went on to lay the blame at the feet of her GOP colleagues for scenes unfolding on the campaign trail:
“This extremism is on display daily in the 2016 presidential campaign, but its origins are firmly rooted in the sustained efforts of Senate Republicans to reject President Obama’s legitimacy and to abuse Senate rules in an all-out effort to cripple the government under his leadership,” she said.
Trump has drawn rebukes from Republicans in Washington for last week suggesting that a federal judge with an Hispanic surname in San Diego acted against him because of his plans to deport millions of illegal Mexican immigrants if he becomes president. The New York billionaire suggested that the judge, Gonzalo Curiel, who reportedly was born in Indiana, unsealed some records in a fraud lawsuit against the candidate’s defunct Trump University as a retaliatory step.
In comments last month. Trump accused Curiel of being “a hater of Donald Trump.”
On releasing the documents, Curiel said one reason for his action was that Trump had “placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue.”
Trump hadn’t responded to Warren’s latest attack by late Monday on Twitter nor had Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentuckian who leads the Republicans in the upper chamber.
Elizabeth Warren during an event in February at the National Press Club in Washington. (AP photo) 
