Sen. Elizabeth Warren learned Tuesday morning that implying Sen. Thom Tillis is a chicken, gets her his full attention.
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Tillis, a Republican from Huntersville, had already grabbed his energy drink — a Celsius — and his name plate from the dais in front of him preparing to leave a Senate hearing, when Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, imitated a chicken and made bok bok sounds at him.
Sixty-seconds before that, Tillis asked if there were any experts in the room who could explain to him if rate-caps on credit cards had ever worked.
Warren tried to answer, but Tillis wouldn’t let her. The senators began shouting over each other as Tillis ticked down the last 45 seconds of his time to question witnesses.
So how did this all begin?
On Tuesday morning, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs held a meeting called “The Affordability Agenda.” The hearing included four witnesses, including Lindsey Johnson, chief executive officer of the Consumer Bankers Association.
Tillis’ time to question the witnesses began around one hour and 15 minutes into the hearing, and he directed his questions to Johnson, asking if she had looked at what he considered “largely failed attempts to cap credit card rates” in other jurisdictions.
She told Tillis that in Illinois, there was a 36% rate cap. Credit card companies tend to offer higher interest rates to riskier clients and with a 36% cap in Illinois, 40% of customers no longer qualified.
Credit card companies tend to offer riskier clients higher interest rates, but if the cap is set too low to make it worth taking on a customer, they might refuse their application altogether.
Tillis then noted that 40% of customers said that put them in worse financial positions, while only 11% thought it helped. He said that that wouldn’t be considered best practice.
Johnson confirmed that anywhere else this had been implemented had “terrible” outcomes.
“My God, time and time again, it just doesn’t work,” Tillis said. “I don’t care which release it is, whether it’s Toy Story 1 or Toy Story 5…it’s not going to end any differently. I don’t even know why we’re having this discussion.”
He then lectured about not allowing companies to rate for risk, arguing that it saves people from themselves.
“I get that…an overdraft fee used to be a courtesy,” Tillis said. “The last time I checked, a lot of banks still give you one or two passes, but when it becomes a chronic problem, at what point are you expected to actually know how much is in your bank account before you write a check? That’s what this is. It’s nothing more than that.”
Tillis went on to say that affordability is nothing new, and drew on his time in a trailer park to punctuate that point.
“I know when I had an affordability problem, it’s when we weren’t living in a house anymore,” Tillis said. “We were living in a trailer, and I saw the overreach of regulatory; and the environment and the Carter administration put me back in a trailer park because they were well-intentioned, but bad, poorly implemented policies.”
He wasn’t done.
“Every time we try to artificially gloss over some of the problems that we have here, with financial literacy, making sure that people really understand, to spend within their means, government tries to help me out, and I’ll be damned if it’s not the times it sends me back to that trailer park,” Tillis said, tongue in cheek.
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Tillis told the committee there are a lot of really rich people making a lot of money, but there are even more who are really hurting and instead of helping, the committee is talking about policy that has been proven to fail. And that’s when he and Warren got into their shouting match.
He asked for the example of the rate caps working, saying he would yield his time to an expert with an answer.
There was a pregnant pause. The room was silent.
But with 45 seconds left, Warren tried to answer, only to be interrupted.
“Point to the one time, in the whole history of the world, in credit cards globally, where it’s worked once,” Tillis shouted.
She shouted over him, halfway through his question: “I got it!”
After he finished she said again before being interrupted, “I got it, and that is when giant corporations…”
“No, you didn’t answer my question,” Tillis said.
They continued to talk over one another and Tillis announced he would reclaim his time.
“I just want one…example of this where this precise policy worked,” Tillis said. “It’s going to be a short discussion — matter of fact, I’ve got five seconds left now, and there’s still no one here that’s going to be offering up one successful example.”
Warren shouted, “I’m here,” as Tillis finished his statement.
But Tillis announced his time had expired.
And that’s when he tried to leave the room, only to be met with Warren’s boks, implying he was a chicken.
C-SPAN’s cameras caught Tillis’ hand sway back and forth as he decided whether to put back down his name plate or continue to leave the room with it in hand.
He sat back down with a smile on his face as he listened to Warren try again to explain her answer, but this time she was cut off by the committee’s top Republican Tim Scott, of South Carolina, who told the audience that Tillis and Warren were being civil toward on another.
“This is great public discourse,” Scott said. “A public discussion where there’s strong disagreement is actually good for the public to hear.”
He offered both Warren, the committee’s top Democrat, and Tillis 30 seconds each for rebuttal.
“I just wanted to remind my colleagues that back during the COVID crisis, the financial institutions all were given free access to overdraft their accounts at the Fed,” Warren said. “It saved them literally billions of dollars because they could get free access to money when they didn’t have money in their accounts.”
She then said the government “politely” asked them to extend the same courtesy to their customers.
“Which they refused to do, and they raked in billions more in profit, so it worked for the big boys,” Warren said, “it just didn’t work for the little guys.”
Tillis didn’t count that as successful.
“So it never worked before,” Tillis said, “but I look forward to somebody presenting the first successful implementation.”
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