Ocasio Cortez Pelosi Democrats
Bush, Ocasio-Cortez, and some other Democrats are calling to expel Greene and other GOP members who spread election disinformation and helped incite the Capitol siege earlier this month. In a video Greene posted on Friday that appeared to show her January 13 encounter with Bush, the Democrat can be heard yelling at Greene to put on her mask. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez insisted that top Democrats House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer should no longer head the party during a new podcast with The Intercept.
Democrats divided? Nancy Pelosi takes shots at socialism, party's progressives
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticizes outspoken freshmen Democrats' embrace of socialism; reaction and analysis on 'The Five.'
Nearly 70 Democrats have been voting in tandem with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez despite House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s scoffing that the far-left Democratic wing was only “like five people.”
Pelosi downplayed the influence of the new-wave progressives, particularly Ocasio-Cortez, who pushed the party leftwards, during an interview with CBS News' Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes,” saying that despite the noise, the party is still largely centrist and rejects socialism “as an economic system.”
“You have these wings, AOC and her group on one side,” Stahl told Pelosi, to which the 79-year-old replied: “That's like five people.”
But according to Fox News’ review of voting records using ProPublica data tools, 68 lawmakers voted with Ocasio-Cortez at least 95 percent of the times since January, representing over a fourth of all seats held by Democrats.
The lawmakers voting in tandem with the New York Democrat aren’t just freshman lawmakers, but include a number of other high-profile Democrats.
Presidential candidates Eric Swalwell and Tulsi Gabbard both voted with Ocasio-Cortez 95 percent of the times. Rep. Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chair, also voted with her 95 percent percent of the time.
Pelosi’s claim that the progressive caucus represents about “five people” appears to be correct only when counting lawmakers who voted 97 percent of the time with the New York Democrat. Those include Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Donald Payne, D-N.J.
During the CBS interview, Pelosi’s remarks were met with pushback, pointing out that the progressive group has more than five people, to which she responded saying she’s a progressive as well.
She added that congressional Democrats “by and large ... know that we have to hold the center, that we have to go down the mainstream,” and said she “reject[s] socialism as an economic system.”
“If people have that view, that's their view,' she said. 'That is not the view of the Democratic Party.”
Pelosi continued taking a swipe at far-left Democrats during her trip to Ireland and the United Kingdom, telling an audience on Monday that both she and Ocasio-Cortez won in districts where “glass of water' with a 'D' next to it could win.
“When we won this election, it wasn’t in districts like mine or Alexandria’s,” Pelosi said. “[S]he’s a wonderful member of Congress as I think all of our colleagues will attest. But those are districts that are solidly Democratic.”
To drive the point home she picked up a water glass next to her and said: “This glass of water would win with a ‘D’ next to its name in those districts.”
Fox News’ Nicole Darrah and Bradford Betz contributed to this report.
House Democrats will almost certainly reelect Nancy Pelosi to a fourth term as Speaker on January 3. She easily survived a caucus vote in November and the full floor vote ought to be just as simple. Although Pelosi’s tenure made her a “slay, queen” heroine to some very online #resistance activists, she has plenty of critics in her own party. If Pelosi’s next term is truly her last, as she’s pledged it will be, it means her legacy is currently at stake. And her record will likely age poorly, for reasons recently articulated by one of her party’s rising stars.
Opposing Pelosi’s reelection as Speaker really only makes sense if they have the numbers and influence to replace her with an ally, and right now, they don’t.
In a new interview, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill that Democrats need fresh leadership. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer should go, she said. The two Democratic leaders and their allies have neglected any “real grooming of a next generation of leadership,” she continued, and the party is now weaker than it should be. “A lot of this is not just about [Pelosi and Schumer], but also about the structural shifts that these two personalities have led in their time in leadership,” she added. With power concentrated in the leadership classes of both parties, she said, individual members have less influence, and less incentive to stay in Congress.
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Ocasio-Cortez is without question one of the most left-wing Democrats in national office: She’s frequently at odds with senior Democrats on major issues like Medicare for All, a policy that Pelosi doesn’t support. But even within this context, her remarks are notable. When a number of House Democrats said they’d vote against Pelosi in 2019, the newly elected Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that party members must “evolve our leadership” before voting for Pelosi. Her new comments are much blunter, though she made it clear that she intends to vote for Pelosi a second time.
Ocasio Cortez Pelosi Democrats Clinton
While it may be tempting for some to fit Ocasio-Cortez’s condemnation of Pelosi and Schumer into the party’s ongoing civil war, that analysis is somewhat inaccurate. Under Pelosi and Schumer, the party has catered to conservative and moderate members while alienating its rising progressive flank, and Ocasio-Cortez’s specific criticisms of Pelosi are certainly informed by ideology. But hostility to Pelosi doesn’t just come from the left. In 2018, opposition to her reelection looked strongest on the party’s right. Two years earlier, moderate Tim Ryan challenged her for Speaker, only to lose. For Pelosi’s progressive critics, this is a problem. Opposing Pelosi’s reelection as Speaker really only makes sense if they have the numbers and influence to replace her with an ally, and right now, they don’t. Ocasio-Cortez recognizes this. “If you create that vacuum, there are so many nefarious forces at play to fill that vacuum with something even worse,” she told Scahill. As long as Pelosi remains to the left of her most organized critics, left-wing Democrats have little choice but to vote for her.
Pelosi On Ocasio Cortez
House progressives may agree with their moderate colleagues about the state of the party’s leadership class. It has become sclerotic, and ought to be replaced. But generational change isn’t always the same thing as a major ideological shift. If left-wing Democrats such as Ocasio-Cortez want to plot a new direction for the party, they don’t have much time left to build the power it will take to replace Pelosi with one of their own.