Brown and Warren to Debate Oct. 1 in Lowell

The second debate between U.S. Senate incumbent Republican Scott Brown and Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren is slated for Monday night and the meetup promises to be another showdown. 

A week of back and forth

Since the first debate between the two candidates a week ago, Brown's campaign has been pressing Warren on her claim to Native American ancestry, calling her integrity into question.

“Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color — and as you can see, she is not,” Brown said at the debate, inferring Warren got special treatment from her employers because of her heritage. 

”I didn’t get an advantage because of my background,” Warren said.

Brown's campaign and the state GOP, however, may have pressed the issue too far. A video shot by a state Democratic Party staffer surfaced this week that reportedly shows Brown staffers and aides, along with a field coordinator for the Massachusetts GOP, making war whoops and tomahawk chop gestures outside a rally for Brown. The video has generated heated criticism of the Senator's campaign.

“I don’t condone that kind of behavior," Brown later told the Boston Herald. "It’s unacceptable."

Brown has also been pressing Warren to provide a list of her corporate law clients that he says she "earned nearly a quarter million dollars working for...in an effort to deny workers their just compensation and promised health care benefits."

Warren called the Brown campaign's scrutiny on these issues a "distraction." 

"Scott Brown has spent the last few weeks trying to talk about anything but his votes and his record," Warren said in a statement. "The distractions need to stop."

Instead, Warren has been campaigning to align Brown with "the big guys" over working families by bringing up Brown's record on extending the Bush tax cuts.  

"I am committed to voting to extend those tax cuts for middle class families," Warren said. "Senator Brown already has voted against them and recently said that he wanted to make it ‘crystal clear’ that he will not vote to extend these tax cuts for middle class families unless the top 2 percent get even bigger tax cuts. That's wrong."

Brown simply argues he won't vote to raise taxes on anyone and that he will only support extending the tax cuts if they are applied across the board. Warren also argues the middle class will see a significant tax hike if the cuts are not extended.

Monday night's debate will be moderated by “Meet the Press” anchor David Gregory. It will begin at 7 p.m. and will be broadcast live on WHDH Channel 7, New England Cable News, WBZ-AM 1030 and WRKO-AM 680. It will be streamed online at bostonherald.com.