6 Candidates For 2020 Whose Records Will Make You Go 'Huh'?

While in law school in the '70s, Warren was deeply influenced by the "Law and Economics" movement, a corporate-funded initiative with the explicit goal of cultivating more conservative judges. When she started her law career at UT Austin, some guy named Bill "Slick Willy" Clinton became the target of her ire. You see, Clinton made a run to return to the Arkansas governor's mansion in 1982, and one of his central campaign promises was to prevent utility companies from preying on the poor and the elderly. Warren sided squarely with the companies, asserting that the state should institute automatic utility rates even if prices went up, and that consumer advocacy groups could eat it (after they'd paid for it, naturally).

What ultimately caused Warren to start on the long road to progressive champion was when she began looking through bankruptcy cases to prove that people filing for it were "all a bunch of cheaters." She found the opposite, that it was mostly people who'd fallen on hard times and couldn't get back up, because the system isn't designed to help them. So she set out to change that system. And along the way, she clashed with some other guy named ...

The whole idea of the bill was to make it harder for people to get out of debt by filing for bankruptcy, because there just isn't enough debt around. On top of limiting the types of debt that can be discharged (no private student loans, for instance), it made the whole process more expensive and byzantine to discourage people from even trying to get back on their feet this way. Oh well, it's not like there was a huge financial crisis looming or anything!

Paul Morse / Wikimedia CommonsWhat's the refund policy on that "strengthening the economy" part?

Anyway, as senator, Biden was instrumental in passing the bill, and later conceded that it probably wasn't a great idea. He claims he voted for it because it was gonna pass anyway, so eh, might as well try to make it slightly less terrible from the inside. We're sure that the large number of credit card companies based in his home state of Delaware didn't even factor into it.

As California prosecutor and attorney general, Harris was tough on crime, because you gotta maintain law and order ... and also those sweet, sweet for-profit prisons. She actively fought to keep more prisoners locked up, despite the Supreme Court ruling that overcrowded California prisons veered into cruel and unusual punishment. Her office even made the horrifying argument that releasing them would decrease the supply of cheap labor.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images"If you like joints so much, why not stay in a big one?"

And this wasn't Harris' only support for truly abysmal policies while in office. She wanted to make truancy a criminal offense, and sought to uphold wrongful convictions. She consistently tried to keep innocent people imprisoned on technicalities, like not presenting legal arguments in a timely manner. Yeah, it's extremely important to always get your dates right, Ms. "Snoop Dogg And Tupac Owned In The Early '80s."

Yes, the homes were owned almost exclusively by impoverished, mostly black people. Turns out fining poor people and destroying their homes isn't a great way to solve homelessness and blight. They couldn't pay the fines or make the repairs because, you know, poverty.

Joshua Lott/Getty ImagesDon't worry, it's only gentrification if people leave because of poverty. When you use a bulldozer, it's called "renewal."

Some residents didn't even know they were on a "demolition list" until the bulldozers showed up. One woman eventually got extensions and permits, but kept getting put back on the "demo list" because she didn't jump through the right bureaucratic hoops. And while Mayor Pete touts the initiative as a major policy win, he's conspicuously left out any mention of demographics in any discussion and all documentation of it. On second thought, "no policies" sounds like an improvement.

O'Rourke likes to position himself as a solid liberal with good credentials, but his record says otherwise. Despite his solidly democratic House district, O'Rourke has voted an unusual amount with the GOP. In 2010, he even co-sponsored a Republican bill to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and destroy protections put in place by the Obama administration to stop predatory lending. His reasoning was that the organization wasn't transparent enough, and his solution was a short-term compromise for a long-term goal. Because if there's one thing the late '00s taught us, it's that we can totally trust the loan industry in the long run.

Also, despite all his talk about climate change, he's voted regularly to boost the fossil fuel industry. He was even one of the few Democrats to vote in favor of lifting an oil export ban. In fact, he voted twice for it. When your most convincing leftist credentials are "used to be in a punk band" and "drops the F-word a lot," you should probably be running a podcast, not the country.

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