Democratic presidential hopefuls Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren (L) and former Vice President Joe Biden take part in the sixth Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign season co-hosted by PBS NewsHour & Politico at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California on December 19, 2019. Frederic J. Brown | AFP | Getty Images

Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren unveiled a proposal on Tuesday to overhaul the nation's personal bankruptcy laws, a direct challenge to rival Joe Biden over landmark legislation from more than a decade ago that she opposed and he supported. "I'm announcing my plan to repeal the harmful provisions in the 2005 bankruptcy bill and overhaul consumer bankruptcy rules in this country to give Americans a better chance of getting back on their feet," Warren wrote in the plan, which the campaign posted on the blogging platform Medium. The plan does not mention former Vice President Biden by name. Warren was one of the nation's leading scholars of bankruptcy law, teaching at Harvard Law School and other universities, before she won her seat in the Senate. The Massachusetts progressive vigorously opposed the 2005 bankruptcy bill while it was under consideration in Congress, while then-Sen. Biden helped to shepherd its passage. The fight over the law was one of the precipitating factors behind Warren's transition from academia into public office and is one of the central policy differences animating the clash between her and Biden, who is more moderate on most issues.

Read more: 'Don't threaten me': Court records show Elizabeth Warren turned down lucrative job after hearing from consumer group The day after Biden entered the race in April, Warren accused him of having been on the "side of the credit card companies." "Our disagreement is a matter of public record," she said at the time. In her plan, Warren said she "lost that fight in 2005" but "didn't stop fighting to hold the financial industry accountable," noting her role in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal regulator established in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The CFPB has returned nearly $12 billion to consumers since it was created, according to government figures. She wrote in her plan that the 2005 bill made that crisis "significantly worse." While bankruptcy has not been one of the top issues that Democrats have seized on in the primary, it is a topic central to Warren's political identity.



"I spent most of my career studying one simple question: why do American families go broke?" she wrote. Warren is in third place in the Democratic presidential race, according to national surveys, behind front-runner Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Warren has fallen in the polls since early October, when she at times was polling narrowly ahead of Biden. Biden did not respond to a request for comment. But in May, the campaign responded to a similar critique by saying in a statement that in 2005 it was "a certainty that the Republican-controlled Congress and White House would turn the bankruptcy bill into law." Biden "fought for and won important concessions for middle class families in it, including protecting access to Chapter 7 forgiveness for working people, making child support and alimony the number one priority for debt payments — in front of big banks and credit card companies — and forcing credit card companies to warn borrowers about their interest rates," the campaign said at the time.