Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is likely to come under fire from some members of her own party again this week after a series of tweets on Saturday which underscored her penchant for speaking the unvarnished truth, even when it’s decidedly inconvenient or otherwise uncouth.
Nancy Pelosi and Jerry Nadler – who have served together for a quarter century – are increasingly at odds over impeaching Donald Trump. The two have clashed on the issue for months, and while Democrats have been keen to insist that the Speaker and House Judiciary chair remain close, the split has become more acrimonious the harder Nadler pushes.
“Pelosi aides [emphasize she] has signed off on all the Judiciary Committee’s court filings targeting the Trump administration, which is where the caucus first formally signaled it was engaged in an impeachment investigation”, Politico wrote this week, before noting that “privately, Pelosi has voiced frustrations with Nadler’s committee, and not just that staff has been moving ahead as though the House were already in formal impeachment proceedings”.
The Speaker is also said to be irritated “with reports that Judiciary staff were lobbying at least one of the panel’s members who had not yet come out for a formal impeachment inquiry”.
Well, AOC has seen just about enough of it all.
“At this point, the bigger national scandal isn’t the president’s lawbreaking behavior – it is the Democratic Party’s refusal to impeach him for it”, she said Saturday.
Her comments came as the president lashed out on Twitter amid an escalating scandal involving a whistle-blower complaint tied to a July phone call (among other things, apparently) during which Trump pressured Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Rudy Giuliani has been working behind the scenes for months to convince Ukraine to go down that road.
Read more: Trump Lashes Out In Ukraine-Biden-Whistle-Blower Scandal, As Allegations Fly
AOC wasn’t done.
“It is one thing for a sitting president to break the law. It’s another to let him.”, she chided, explicitly accusing some Democrats of effectively countenancing illegality on the part of the White House by not acting to remove a lawless executive.
She is, of course, correct. This is yet another instance of the freshman firebrand saying, in plain terms, what everyone knows is true, but is generally unwilling to admit, or at least not with the same unapologetic flair. Indeed, one could easily argue that a good portion of the backlash AOC receives is due to how uncomfortable it makes people when a politician of her status (and note that “status” is used here to denote visibility, not “clout” on the Hill) refuses to budge an inch when it comes to how she communicates.
[Aside: The capitalism debate is perhaps the best example of that dynamic. Earlier this year, at South by Southwest (where she drew a bigger crowd than Elizabeth Warren, who just overtook Joe Biden in Iowa), AOC called capitalism “irredeemable“. And it is – “irredeemable”. Almost unfailingly, Americans will insist that capitalism is a wealth creation machine and a system that has allowed the country to build an empire the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Rome. And yet, when asked to produce of evidence of all the “wealth” capitalism has “created” for them, those Americans come up empty, figuratively and literally. The vast majority of Americans are broke, and almost all Americans are comparatively broke. That is a direct, inescapable consequence of a system that concentrates the means of wealth creation in the hands of a relative few. It’s true by definition, something AOC underscored back in March. “Capitalism is an ideology of capital — the most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit”, she said, adding that because this endless quest to improve the bottom line often comes at the expense of people and the environment “capitalism is irredeemable”.]
Ultimately, Ocasio-Cortez drove the impeachment point home on Saturday by emphasizing that “The integrity of our democracy isn’t threatened when a president breaks the law, it‘s threatened when we do nothing about it”.
That, in and of itself, could be a campaign rallying cry, but just in case it still wasn’t clear, she added that “The GOP’s silence & refusal to act shouldn’t be a surprise. Ours is.”
I love that bartender. Only children under the age of 4, drunks, and bartenders tell the truth.