What are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Flaws?

that's the most frustrating thing about this, people like Cruz, Hawley, MTG, and Boebert should all be immediately ejected from Congress and never be allowed into public life again but the Trump era kinda wiped out the entire notion that rightwingers should face any consequences for their actions, and if you're someone like AOC I dunno how you take your mind off "next time they might actually succeed"

The lesson AOC is demonstrating here: you have to have your own back, because sometimes nobody will speak up for you otherwise. What she has done is really fucking brave.

It just seems like getting them out of there ASAP would be a priority, and if there's not enough movement on that front I wish there were. Outright naming them would I think get the ball moving faster, but maybe not.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, February 2, 2021 4:12 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I know this is the AOC thread but I feel like screaming from the rooftops that Rep Cori Bush has NAMED MTG AS HAVING THREATENED HER IN THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE HER OFFICE and all that happened was that Pelosi graciously allowed Rep Bush to move HER OWN OFFICE somewhere else so she and her staff wouldn't be in danger from either covid or being shot by a fellow representative, take your fucking pick.

You speak up and try to make it hard for them to ignore what happened. Not the perpetrators, the people who don’t want to face it. Make it hard for them, make it bad.

I think if there's one thing all of the squad have learned by now it's that no one in the established Dem party is going to protect them, politically or actually physically, when the danger could not be more obviously announcing itself with stormtroopers. AOC is using tech that her elders don't begin to understand, in order to connect with people and tell the truth so she can't be muffled by her enemies OR her "allies."

So maybe less of the "maybe the junior representative from the Bronx doesn't understand the political landscape" doubts cast everywhere.

again, we had a President who openly committed dozens of crimes while in office & lied to the American public literally every time he spoke, and every single Republican member was basically fine with it. there isn't really a "political landscape" right now

a thing that makes me very sad to think about is how openly hostile democratic leadership has been to AOC and how eager they remain to ~bridge the divide~ with republicans even after the breach at the capitol

— Mary Ellen (@alissacaliente) February 2, 2021

reading between the lines she definitely seems to be implying that certain members of Congress were helping the rioters or at least were giving them directions. I know there was a lot of talk about a certain member (Boebert?) giving tours to the people who raided the Capitol the next day.

“openly hostile democratic leadership...” yeah okay pump the breaks maybe it’s is a bit of a stretch and morally questionable probably to force an equivalency here between her harrowing and legit scary experience of right wingers coming into where she works to harm her with disagreements she’s had with other representatives in her party. Keep in mind I don’t think these people were planning on having a nice friendly chat with Pelosi if they found her either.

Think I originally read about this on twitter so I forget what the source was, but here's at least one article reporting that the leader of the Oath Keepers was getting messages from inside the building about the specific whereabouts of officials, such as "Tom, the speaker has left the chamber" and others detailed here:

https://www.businessinsider.com/capitol-siege-far-right-rioters-used-facebook-to-hunt-lawmakers-fbi-2021-1

The implication aiui is that some of the intel had to be coming from fellow officials bc the invaders never actually saw Pelosi & others that day and wouldn't have known exactly where they were/when they were being moved.

She’s gotten good committee assignments and had establishment Dems co-sponsor bills w her. This angle isn’t necessary.

i don’t see how anyone with progressive ideals can maintain faith in electoral politics when a young woman who’s just a little more progressive than the bulk of the party gets so shut out and so consistently disrespected and undermined

— Mary Ellen (@alissacaliente) February 2, 2021

weird hill to die on, Don

Don has died on so many weird hills in his brief tenure!

posting from beyond the grave

which is on the hill

Am I supposed to know something about Mary Ellen (or Alissa Caliente) that makes her opinion particularly worth sharing multiple times itt. Not being a dick, just not sure why some apparently random twitter person with 8k followers is important.

Not really. Those tweets are deranged.

Q: how many twitter followers does it take to make someone important, and do you seriously use this as a metric w/r/t what opinions are "worth sharing" cuz that's fucked up buddy.

Idk who she is specifically but I follow her bc I like her content and she's also followed by storied former ilxors such as A. Hoos and several journalists I follow.

Re committees: I heard in interview last year w AOC and a former member of Financial Svcs, saying that she signed up for those committees because she discovered that reps had to buy their way into other, more desirable, seats, and she didn't have the war chest to fund that, so she went for what were considered boring seats on committees that hadn't previously been very active or influential. I'll try to find it.

Am I supposed to know something about Mary Ellen (or Alissa Caliente) that makes her opinion particularly worth sharing multiple times itt. Not being a dick, just not sure why some apparently random twitter person with 8k followers is important.

“openly hostile democratic leadership...” yeah okay pump the breaks maybe it’s is a bit of a stretch and morally questionable probably to force an equivalency here between her harrowing and legit scary experience of right wingers coming into where she works to harm her with disagreements she’s had with other representatives in her party. Keep in mind I don’t think these people were planning on having a nice friendly chat with Pelosi if they found her either.

Jfc I was just curious to know if she was someone in the know or not. She has no verified checkmark and her bio is very unhelpful.

I don't give a shit at all about follower counts, but I do at least like to weigh where the opinions are coming from. I don't think asking if anyone knows more about her is at all out of bounds, I was looking for context. Like is she a DC insider? Does she write for a specific outlet?

generally when you have to say "not being a dick" it means... you're gonna be a dick.

Someone shared a tweet that tried to frame this right wing insurrection event byproduct of their generic “Dems bad” gripes. Maybe that’s considered “good praxis” idk but I said that was a bad thing to do, for obvious reasons..

xp why post this comment in a thread with a bunch of randoms offering their opinions? If a comment is right, it’s right whether it’s someone on here or someone on twitter you’ve never heard of.

*as a byproduct

I have absolutely zero opinion on her because I genuinely have no fucking clue who she is, so I was hoping some ilxor might help me understand more. That's all. With ilxors I generally have context from their other posts about where they might be coming from. I'll leave.

Not remotely dickish to ask “who is she?”

You're not wrong. She's just a random.

The difference in her tweet and ILX randoms is that ILX randoms are posting here - they can be questioned or challenged on their posts.

It's actually Mary-Ellen and Alissa Caliente. They're twins!

AOC's words - but we should 100% give more credence to how a random has read the tea leaves of her committee assignments lol

I don’t know. I think I’ll have probably more answers as we get through transition, and to the next term. How the party responds will very much inform my approach and what I think is going to be necessary.

The last two years have been pretty hostile. Externally, we’ve been winning. Externally, there’s been a ton of support, but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.

Is the party ready to, like, sit down and work together and figure out how we’re going to use the assets from everyone at the party? Or are they going to just kind of double down on this smothering approach? And that’s going to inform what I do.

how an ILX random*

Big Don can roll in here to tell us how that's not actually her experience

You’ve contributed literally nothing to this thread except sniping at me and in orbit today, idk why you’re wasting your time pretending you’re a leftist.

Don has died on so many weird hills in his brief tenure!

Pretty sure this was the podcast interview in question.

who really knows what happened?

lots of ambiguity

safe to say everyone has limited info,including aoc.

Intercept Podcast Special: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Play • 40 min
Today we’re presenting a podcast special from our Intercept colleagues in DC. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joins Intercept reporters Ryan Grim and Briahna Joy Gray for an in-depth conversation about her fresh approach to politics, her thoughts on 2020, and her insurgent congressional campaign. As a new member of the House Financial Services Committee, she’s already shaping the conversation with her call to raise the top marginal tax rate to 70%. And former North Carolina congressman Brad Miller, a progressive Democrat who served for years on the committee, joins the conversation to talk about the challenges Ocasio-Cortez will face there.

I guess we can think of leftist reasons to pretend that’s relevant to right wingers trying to kill both her and her establishment Dem colleagues. I understand the recreational aspect of that, I honestly do.

They start talking about the committee structure and how you have to sign up and pledge to raise funds for the party in order to get on "good" committees at around 19:55. AOC:

"Very early after I won my primary, there was a lot of outreach from incumbent Democrats and the one question everyone kept asking was what committee do you want to be on? And I literally had just gotten elected and I was like Idk what committees are there?...

I spent one day in DC and I met with some folks, and it wasn't until the very end of the day that I was told, you know, if you want a good committee, you've got to raise funds. And I remember saying, well, because at that time I had raised funds for other progressive candidates... we had raised over $50 or $100k for other progressive, non corporate funded campaigns, so I was like, 'I am raising funds' and they were like, 'No, to the D-trip (DCCC).'

So I remember leaving it, like, 'I'm going to get put on some terrible committee,' and so...election time comes and we're just getting our assignments this week, January of the new term, but we've basically spent the last 3 months since the election lobbying--and this is a very opaque process--no one hands you a sheet of paper and says, 'This is how you get on a committee.' So a lot of freshmen are just babes in the woods, and you talk to a lot of people. But one of the interesting developments on Financial Services is, we were asking to be put on an Exclusive Committee, and for a freshman that doesn't normally happen. And then we started feeling much more reception to this request than we had anticipated, and were like, what's going on? And I had sat down with Chairwoman Waters, and it seems like we're in this very interesting moment where, after the financial crisis, all these activists and advocates really started zeroing in on the FSC, and because its members were getting so much more scrutiny than they had in the past, it no longer became the same kind of fund-raising committee because those members were getting targeted a lot, and so as a result a lot of the incumbent members on it had left to go to other money committees, and so it opened up this huge window. And so this year the FSC has actually been staffed with a lot of progressives on it."

There have been articles written about progressives doing similar things locally and running for, like, dog catcher and using whatever levers of power there to impact beyond the scope of the mission (dog shit impacts waste management, for example). The worst example pf this is the rando loon who wrote himself in for pennsylvania tax collector or whatever

So no, she didn't "get good committee assignments" because they loved her so much and wanted her to do this work. She got dumped onto FSC when no one else wanted it, and then the squad started actually doing the work and that has upset ppl (donors).

many xposts: "I thought that was debunked and it was Boebert giving a tour of the Colorado capitol some months ago."

youre conflating two different things. there was a photo going around with the claim that she gave these people a tour before the insurrection; that photo was actually of the capitol in Colorado from last year. However, she did give a tour to people before the insurrection; her mother was one of them. Other Reps. have said vaguely that one of the members did this but they didn't name names, for whatever reason.

I'm not sure how you square "I asked to be on an Exclusive Committee and was put on one when spots opened up beyond the arcane, undocumented process normally used to staff them" with "She got dumped onto FSC when no one else wanted it". Like, from her own words it seems that she wanted to be on the committee and that Waters was actively soliciting her and other progressives at the time the assignments happened.

I'm not sure how picking at that not-very-clear process is in opposition to the idea that the establishment Dems don't love pressure from their own left, and that very highly visible reps AOC and Cori Bush are speaking out about not being adequately protected by their own party?!

Maybe they haven't directly called out the party specifically because I seem to remember a lot of drama when AOC said last year that Pelosi might need replacing and I'm sure some lessons were learned from that. But when progressive reps take to other media platforms and tell their stories in a way that might seem non-traditional and outside of existing reporting structures, it's not a coincidence??

It isn't, specifically. It just doesn't seem like an accurate representation of how she got on the committee in the first place and, to me, warps the interpretation of her description of the problems she subsequently had with leadership. You're casting it as doomed from the beginning and it doesn't read that way to me, and because it doesn't read that way to me I have more hope that the pressure she's putting on leadership isn't entirely unwanted (it certainly shouldn't have been surprising) and that there's conflict built by definition into the job description for committee leadership that the pressure she's applying is highlighting, above and beyond "the Democratic leadership just doesn't like her and is hobbling her at the behest of their donors".

I think there is understandable and expected tension between how the committees function and how we want them to function, and while I would cheerfully chuck every sitting Republican into a deep river at this point, they are coworkers in this workplace who hold no accountability to their coworkers; until voters get rid of them, leadership in the House and Senate have to figure out the best way coexist with them, particularly since they don't have the numbers to outright block them out of participating in the legislative process.

I'm not trying to say there's not conflict or that AOC's description of it is overblown. I'm saying there are still more similarities than differences between the wings/factions of the Democratic Party and I don't expect them to wholesale offer their most popular members as sacrificial lambs to bloodthirsty Republicans, which informs how I interpret overtures/interactions between Democratic and Republican leadership. I don't have all the details and I don't think AOC is making up anything in her description of what has been happening; I can only take her words at face-value and incorporate them with my understanding of the way Washington politics works.

I mean, I hope there's hope too! And I have no insights into how she or Pressley or Tlaib got on FSC--except that it was unexpected, and AOC implies that she had no ability or interest in promising to make large donations/fundraise for the DCCC in return. (I consolidated some of that interview, she goes into slightly more detail about how the DCCC had been unsupportive in progressive races.) I'm thrilled that Pressley and Tlaib ended up on that committee too and they've all been amazing. If Waters *was* stuck, at that time, with high-ranking FSC members abandoning ship because they couldn't be as corrupt as they had gotten accustomed to being, she was probably happy to get rid of them! And get progressive women of color in their places! Imo that's a net gain all around.

Specifically I was reacting to Don saying that "she got good committee assignments" as proof that there wasn't significant tension between her and the party and that it was "deranged" to think there was hostility there. Dem leadership is not adequately protecting its progressive members and that is terrifying if that's the best they can hope for.