Ocasio-Cortez on Democrats: "As a Party, We Get So Scared of Losing"
On Tuesday morning, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on EBRO In The Morning, the drive-time show, covering news, politics, and celebrities, on hip-hop radio channel HOT 97 in New York City. Hosts Ebro Darden, Laura Stylez, and Peter Rosenberg, early supporters of Ocasio-Cortez's campaign, kicked off the interview telling her that "we're proud of all the noise you're making." The hosts and Ocasio-Cortez then dove into the "heat" the freshman Democratic congresswoman has been taking from every direction including Fox News and some in her own party.
Ocasio-Cortez explained that she "won a mandate to change the conversation in DC," not to sit back, and that part of the reason why she was getting so much pushback was that she sometimes makes some in her own party "uncomfortable." She pointed out: "I'm not super partisan in my critiques. I don't just talk about Republicans. I talk about our own back yard."
The hosts asked about her recent one-on-one meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which Ocasio-Cortez characterized as "good and productive." "As a party, we get so scared of losing," she said, adding it was not a critique of the Speaker herself but about conversations she believe needed to happen in the party. "I think there's always going to be that friction," she said. "The easiest way to keep your job is to fly under the radar."
When asked about whether she and Pelosi discussed impeachment Ocasio-Cortez said that the topic didn't come up directly, but she pointed out that Pelosi's hands are tied even with more than 100 members of Congress now supporting opening an impeachment inquiry, and that a good number of Democrats still don't support it. "The magic number is 218," she said, which is the minimum for a simple majority in the House. "Her job is a vote counter," she said of Pelosi, and she isn't likely to move on anything without being sure she has the votes to get it passed.
With impeachment and Donald Trump, Ocasio-Cortez noted, it's "always a corruption thing." She turned to the recent dust-up of Trump singling out House Oversight chair Elijah Cummings, tweeting that Cummings should take care of "rat infested" Baltimore, a city in his district, before trying to hold the administration accountable for its child detention policies. "You want to know the real reason [he targeted Cummings]?" she asked, noting that Cummings is the Chairman for the Oversight Committee, which just uncovered documents showing that the administration showed a draft of an energy policy speech to senior officials of the United Arab Emirates before it was delivered to get notes. "The Trump Administration has virtually obliterated the lines normally separating government policy making from corporate and foreign interests," Cummings wrote in an accompanying report.
The attack on Cummings fits in a broader context of Trump and Republicans repeatedly weaponizing race as a political tool. Whether its hearings on treatment of children at the border, a potential impeachment inquiry, or reports on corruption, Trump uses racial animosity as a distraction quite deftly.
Originally Appeared on GQ
