Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fired back Saturday night after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
criticized her and other far-left freshmen congresswomen for voting
against a $4.6 billion border bill that President Trump signed into law
on Monday.
Congress had approved the bill with help from moderate
Democrats – and in a New York Times interview Pelosi slammed the
progressive wing of her party for not also supporting the
humanitarian-assistance measure.
“All these people have their public whatever
and their Twitter world,” Pelosi said. “But they didn’t have any
following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
But Ocasio-Cortez took a different view.
“That
public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment,” Ocasio-Cortez answered
later in a Twitter message. “And wielding the power to shift it is how
we actually achieve meaningful change in this country.”
In a
separate message, Ocasio-Cortez also defended the use of social media by
herself and her fellow newcomers to Congress, over the more traditional
– and often more expensive and time-consuming — methods favored by
longer-serving lawmakers.
“I find it strange when members act as
though social media isn’t important,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “They set
millions of [dollars] on [fire] to run TV ads so people can see their
message.
“I haven’t dialed for dollars *once* this year,” she
added, “& have more time to do my actual job. Yet we’d rather
campaign like it’s 2008.”
Ocasio-Cortez also criticized the
Democrats who decided to vote along with Republicans on the spending
plan to address issues at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“I don’t believe
it was a good idea for Dems to blindly trust the Trump admin when so
many kids have died in their custody. It’s a huge mistake,” she wrote.
“This admin also refuses to hand over docs to Congress on the
whereabouts of families. People’s lives are getting bargained, & for
what?”
In a Washington Post op-ed
published Friday, author Ryan Grim writes that Ocasio-Cortez sees older
Democrats as too eager to compromise with Republicans, whom she regards
as “clowns.”
“Ocasio-Cortez told me that she treats Republicans
like buffoons because that’s how they’ve behaved for as long as she can
remember,” Grim writes. “’Even before I was of voting age, I saw
Republicans accuse the Obamas of doing a ‘terrorist fist bump,’ so
they’ve been clowns since I was a teen,’ she said.”
“Ocasio-Cortez
told me that she treats Republicans like buffoons because that’s how
they’ve behaved for as long as she can remember.”
— Ryan Grim, writing in the Washington Post
Meanwhile,
some Republicans and other critics have called Ocasio-Cortez
hypocritical for opposing the border bill, which her critics say was
designed to address many of the problems that she and other far-left
Democrats have been complaining about in recent weeks.
“People
like AOC create the disaster, refuse to fix it, vote against funding to
help people and then go down there to attack the people who are saying
to her, ‘We don’t have enough money, we don’t have enough facilities,’”
former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich said on Fox News’ “America’s
Newsroom” last week, calling Ocasio-Cortez "viciously dishonest."
