Earlier this year , 17 Senate Democrats joined every Senate Republican in voting to weaken bank regulations put in place after the 2008 financial crisis. The most strident opponent of these changes was Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren. A former bank bailout oversight chief and longtime expert on financial issues, Warren explicitly excoriated her Democratic colleagues for supporting the changes in a last-bid effort to stop them. It is rare for a member of Congress to openly castigate members of their party over a high-profile vote. In an interview with The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan for his Deconstructed podcast, Warren at first avoided criticizing her Democratic colleagues when asked about that vote.

“So on the bankers’ front, we have the Dodd-Frank law. Ten years on from the financial crash, parts of it are repealed in a vote in the Senate: Seventeen Democrats voted for that; 33 Democrats in the House voted to repeal parts of that legislation. Why?” Hasan asked. Warren responded by putting the blame on Republicans. She noted that community banks had asked for some changes in the Dodd-Frank financial law and that some Republican and Democrats were willing to make changes in that area. “But, no, said the Republicans, and their big-bank donors. They said: The only way this bill goes forward is if there are giveaways for the giant financial institutions,” she said, summarizing what happened next. “But you expect that from the Republicans. My question is: the Democrats who did that, was that a betrayal?” Hasan asked. Warren continued to rail against the substance of the changes, noting that some of the “largest financial institutions in this country” will be under less scrutiny. Hasan continued to press Warren to offer some critical inspection of why the Democratic Party failed to unite to stop the changes. “So tell me why 17 Democrats in the Senate and 33 Democrats in the House voted to repeal this. Was it money? Was it the influence of money?” Warren again deflected. “They helped make this a riskier system, and I think that is a bad decision. All day long, they said they were there for the community banks, but using the community banks as human shields to be able to get giveaways for giant banks was wrong,” she said of the legislation. Finally, Hasan pointed to an earlier interview with Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders in which he said that most Democrats don’t “have the guts to take on the billionaire class,” in the senator’s words. “Do you agree with him?” Hasan wanted to know. After a pause, Warren replied, “Yeah.”