Elizabeth Warren's Year In Review

Alan: When Elizabeth Warren's election was announced last November, I turned to my 16 year old son and said: "This woman is going to do great things over the next 25 years."

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For an awful lot of us, the highlight of the 2012 election was Elizabeth Warren's victory over Scott Brown in Massachusetts. That's because of moments like this, from the campaign:

"You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

She hasn't veered from that philosophy, and she sure hasn't disappointed in her first year as a U.S. Senator. Jump below the fold for just a few highlights of her first year in the Senate.

Here's her first-ever hearing, and her challenge: When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial?

Here's another hearing, where she grilled Sallie Mae officials why they are ripping off taxpayers.

Remember how she schooled the smug, arrogant CNBC hosts about Glass-Steagall? Priceless.

Here she is, blasting the Republicans for the government shutdown over Obamacare:

With millions of people still out of work, with an economic recovery that is still far too fragile, with students and families being crushed by student loan debt, with millions of seniors denied their chance at one hot meal a day with Meals on Wheels and millions of little children pushed out of Head start because of a sequester, with the country hours away from a government shutdown and days away from a potential default on the nation’s debt, the Republicans have decided that the single most important issue facing our nation is to change the law so that employers can deny women access birth control coverage.

Finally, here she is arguing for expanding Social Security: "This is partly about math, but it's partly about our values. This is about what kind of a people we are, what kind of a country we are trying to build."

When we talk about "more and better Democrats" here, this is precisely what we mean. Bring on 2014!