Sen. Elizabeth Warren is well known for her progressive stances on “Medicare for All” and taxing the rich. But over the past year, the senior Democratic senator from Massachusetts has collaborated with a number of conservative Republicans.
Warren partnered with Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina to overwhelmingly pass a bill aimed at increasing the country’s housing supply, authored an op-ed alongside Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno on the future of social security and introduced a measure with Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley to limit stock buybacks by defense contractors.
“We have a great work relationship,” Hawley said about Warren. “We’ve done a lot of issues that are really pocketbook issues that are about trying to make sure that working people can afford health care, see their doctor.”
Warren told NOTUS that she is always looking for common ground with lawmakers across the ideological spectrum and has found areas of overlap with some Republicans on cost-of-living and anti-corruption issues.
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“It’s about lowering costs for working families. I look for places of intersection,” she said. “We may disagree on 99 things, but if I can find one that we agree on and make some progress, I am ready to go.”
Hawley, who over the years has worked with Warren on legislation to break up health care conglomerates, rein in pharmacy benefit managers and tackle electricity costs for data centers, told NOTUS that he has long looked to Warren as a partner in the Democratic Party.
Moreno, another Republican who has praised President Donald Trump for creating a “new, populist Republican Party,” told NOTUS that his recent work with Warren was born out of a conversation in a budget hearing.
Warren approached Moreno and asked to partner on a New York Times opinion piece on a plan for Social Security. Moreno said that work expanded quickly — the two met to try to identify a path forward and assembled a team that is working on a legislative solution before funds are set to run out in 2032.
Moreno said he didn’t find it difficult to identify common ground with Warren.
“Sometimes you have to go into it without that [partisanship],” Moreno said. “I know everything here is shirts and skins, but you have to walk in and say, ‘Look, we’re not going to let seniors go into poverty, right?’”
Hawley added that his collaboration with Warren could serve as a model in 2027, since the Senate is expected to remain a narrowly divided chamber and bipartisanship will still be necessary to advance most legislation.
Hawley noted that he also worked with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a progressive independent who caucuses with Democrats, on efforts to provide stimulus checks during the COVID-19 pandemic and to cap credit card interest rates.
He added that he increasingly finds common ground with populist lawmakers in the opposing party. As Democrats have begun to nominate progressives in Senate primaries across the country, Hawley said he’s ‘hoping’ to find more partners across the aisle.
“There’s a lot of things that we will overlap on because I’m really concerned about working-class issues, they are, and when it comes to promoting competition, promoting fairness, ethics rules, insider trading, we tend to see eye to eye on all of those things,” Hawley said.
Warren’s chief bipartisan achievement this year, the Road to Housing Act, passed the Senate 85-5 and became law in July. The legislation was the product of more than a year of negotiations between Warren, who is the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, and Scott, the chair.
It combined some of Warren’s top priorities, such as reining in corporate home buying, with Scott’s goal of minimizing regulatory red tape.
“We have a bill that Republicans and Democrats built,” Warren said, crediting the bipartisan nature of the bill for its success. “It is good for urban America, rural America, first-time home buyers, renters, seniors, families that are expanding.”
Scott told The Washington Post last year that he and Warren barely knew each other before starting to craft the bill in 2025. Despite their differences, the unlikely duo identified a common problem in the housing market, he said.
“On the Banking Committee, the 21st Century Housing bill really came together because we were able to find partnerships with folks like Elizabeth Warren and Sen. [Ruben] Gallego and Sen. [Angela] Alsobrooks,” Scott told constituents at a South Carolina Business Council gathering in July, referring to two other Democratic members.
Since Warren dropped out of the 2020 Democratic presidential contest and indicated she no longer has interest in higher office, she said she’s focused on finding a path for enacting her policy priorities.
“I have to think a lot about, where is the best place for me to go to keep fighting those fights. My job is to fight them as smartly and effectively as I can,” she told reporters outside her Massachusetts home at the time.
Some of Warren’s bipartisan work this year indicates she has found that place in the Senate. Several of the same tenets on housing policy she talked about on the campaign trail, like increasing housing supply and encouraging reforms to restrictive land-use rules, became law as part of her bill with Scott.
Though Warren said she’s enjoyed partnering with Republicans on housing and Social Security issues, she added there’s a wide gap between them in one area: imposing stricter ethics rules on the president and other elected officials.
She has been at the forefront of the effort to reign in Trump’s ability to profit from cryptocurrency as the Senate Banking Committee struggles to advance bipartisan legislation around regulating the burgeoning industry. But she’s frustrated that those provisions have drawn pushback from some Republicans.
“Right now, I just wish I could find a Republican who would work on ethics issues,” Warren said. “With Trump in the White House, that’s a bigger challenge.”
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