Posted on 07/11/2019 4:05:33 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
A growing number of progressive House Democrats, frustrated with an ongoing spat between Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D), are taking the freshman New Yorker to task for accusing Pelosi of treating minority women unfairly.
The critics say Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, crossed a line when she accused Pelosi of putting a target on “newly elected women of color” for their far-left policy positions.
The remarks — and the media uproar they’ve created — led exasperated Democrats to sound off Thursday against the freshman social-media sensation, accusing Ocasio-Cortez of harboring unrealistic views about her own influence on Capitol Hill — to the detriment of the Democrats’ ambitious policy agenda.
“What a weak argument,” said Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), a member of both the Black and Progressive caucuses. “Because you can’t get your way and because you’re getting pushback you resort to using the race card? Unbelievable. Unbelievable to me.”
Other liberals, while not so seething, also defended Pelosi, warning of the political dangers of adhering to stringent ideological demands — and airing gripes with other Democrats in public.
“You know how people lose the elections? By not having the ability to see the big picture and not being able to keep their eye on the ball,” said Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), a Black Caucus member.
But Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair who is Indian American, said that she could relate to Ocasio-Cortez feeling targeted as a woman of color.
“I can tell you that it happens all the time. It isn't usually from just one person. The system is geared in that way,” Jayapal said. “It's just a constant thing we deal with as women of color. It's always harder when it's perceived as coming from your own side, whether that was how it was intended or not.”
Jayapal said that she and her fellow Progressive Caucus co-chair, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), are requesting a meeting with Pelosi to “talk about the general relationship of the progressives to the Democratic caucus.”
“I think it's just important that we clear this,” Jayapal said.
The seeds of the recent quarrel were planted before the July 4 recess, when Pelosi reluctantly ditched plans to move a House-crafted border spending package in favor of a more conservative Senate-passed bill.
Liberals like Ocasio-Cortez, furious over reports that migrants have been detained at the border under dismal health and hygienic conditions, had demanded that the legislation include explicit protections for those in federal custody — provisions not contained in the Senate bill.
Some liberals accused the moderate Democrats who’d pressed for the Senate bill of putting child migrants at risk. Pocan, for instance, equated Democrats in the Problem Solvers Caucus to child abusers. Ocasio-Cortez’s top aide, chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti, went a long step further, accusing the centrist members of the Blue Dog and New Democratic coalitions of being racist.
“They certainly seem hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s,” Chakrabarti said in a tweet that has since been deleted.
That tweet prompted Pelosi, in an extraordinary closed-door meeting Wednesday, to scold her troops for airing public grievances instead of taking their concerns directly to her — a message she defended Thursday.
“They took offense because I addressed, at the request of my members, an offensive tweet that came out of one of the members' offices that referenced our Blue Dogs and our New Dems essentially as segregationists,” Pelosi said at a Thursday press conference, referring to the tweet from Ocasio-Cortez’s top aide. “Our members took offense at that. I addressed that. How they're interpreting and carrying it to another place is up to them.”
Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), a New Democrats vice chair who is African American, issued a statement on Thursday criticizing the comparison to segregationists.
“I personally experienced Dixiecrats’ bigoted policies growing up. So, to even insinuate that I, or any other member of the New Dems, would promote policies that are racist and hateful or ones that would negatively impact communities of color is deeply offensive and couldn’t be further from the truth,” Sewell said. Ocasio-Cortez told The Washington Post on Wednesday that she felt Pelosi was targeting her and three other progressive freshman women of color, known as the “squad”: Reps. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.).
“When these comments first started, I kind of thought that she was keeping the progressive flank at more of an arm’s distance in order to protect more moderate members, which I understood,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Post. “But the persistent singling out . . . it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful . . . the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”
Ocasio-Cortez maintained in an interview with CNN on Thursday that she thinks the progressive freshmen are being singled out but rejected the notion that Pelosi has racial animus.
The flare-up comes on the heels of Pelosi’s interview last week with The New York Times, when she noted the four freshmen were the only Democrats to oppose the party’s more liberal border bill and therefore had limited clout in the subsequent debate over the Senate version, even despite their considerable social media presence.
“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.”
Progressive Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), while stressing she is friendly with both Pelosi and the freshmen, echoed the Speaker in arguing the four have limited influence as a bloc.
“I think it's really not accurate to call them the ‘squad,’” Schakowsky said. “It's not like they, you know, they see themselves as a squad and get together and say, ‘Now, what's our next move?’”
Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), another progressive, praised both Pelosi — who has a life-long track record fighting for racial justice and women’s rights — and the freshmen rabble-rousers, who have infused the party with a wave of energy and fresh ideas.
“We admire them; they energize us; they're eager,” Moore said. “And of course they have the luxury of — it is a luxury — just to be able to represent [their] district and to be strident.
“Nancy, of course, is the leader, so she has to represent all of us.”
But Moore also said the influence of freshmen like Ocasio-Cortez ultimately rests with how many votes they can actually sway.
“They’ll learn. It’s all about the 218 in this game,” said Moore, who is African American. “You can be a star if you want to be, but it’s all about the 218.”
“AOC has powerful backing, and those backers are shrewd.”
Yep, I agree with that. The woman is an actress, and in today’s political arena, that’s what it takes. Obama was smarter than AOC, but bottom line, he was an actor.
“She IS a racist. Do any of you have “brown” grandchildren, or “brown” spouses or sons/daughters in law? I do. I also have “brown” blood. Her family is lily-white. No brown or black blood in her descendants. She talks a good racist-blaming game, but she made sure that none of HER BLOOD was brown or black.”
According to that logic, anyone who has no brown or black blood is necessarily racist. Especially if they have no brown or black blood in their descendants.
Only stupid people believe that.
Or is that racist too?
Well, you know, that’s justified when you lie about people you really, really hate. Dem morality at work.
I hope she “stays on” until the next election! She and her raghead cohorts are the gifts that keep on giving.
The only thing different, the ONLY thing different here, is Mike Lillis and Cristina Marcos decided to break the embargo against Democrats v Democrats and put Pelosi's CBC brigade on the record against AOC. (On a Friday News Dump day, albeit)
The CBC in particular have been dying to call out this quinceanera-arrested-development-bartendress-masquerader. "AOC is usurping COLOR!" "AOC is a nutty UTOPIAN!" "AOC be talking out of school, bout' time we threw some shade back."
But it's a Friday News Dump.
Hopefully provoking her gets her to say something dangerously stupid today, that would fuel the weekend.
Also WHY isn't a charismatic conservative like JC Watts running? You don't have to live there! Just undercut AOC's brownness with a proud black man!
“What a weak argument,” said Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), a member of both the Black and Progressive caucuses. “Because you can’t get your way and because you’re getting pushback you resort to using the race card? Unbelievable. Unbelievable to me.”
Why didn't any Republicans use that against BHO!?
Well, cuz she just said it yesterday. But I think we’ll be seeing it again...
The Dem Party will always be led by white libs; the darker people are just their useful pawns. The AOC/Pelosi squabble shows what happens when one of the pawns (a freshman at that) gets uppity...
I don’t think Pelosi will be able to stop AOC short of having her killed. AOC does have a few campaign finance issues that could be investigated but the optics for the Dem’s could be bad to go after their own that way, plus other Dems have probably used the same type of devices to get into office and it would make them open to AOC’s charge of...”so did so and so and so and so and so and so”. AOC might even go as far if pressured to demand the opening of the congressional records on payouts for congressional sexual harassers.
Chakrabati got 7 new social Dems elected to office out of 27 of their own that won their primaries....not a bad start. He knows where even the old guard buries their financial skeletons. I don’t think Pelosi will be able to get a handle on this issue and while they try to diminish the influence of the “squad” of 4, they are having an impact wider publically than their diminished influence on congressional priorities. These 4 have devoted national followers and fans(though with AOC not necessarily in her own district) and thus won’t be easily shushed up or removed without a fight.
Trump hinted at what he could do with Tlaib, about certain immigration and finance regularities in his tweet and how she could go back to where she came from;if I were Pelosi, I’d be viewing it as a backdoor invitation to have something done thru tax investigations and immigration investigations. Trump doesn’t like Tlaib’s comments on Americans and while he publicly trolled Pelosi...it sounded like a backdoor....”let’s have a conversation” invite.
If we hear of a Pelosi-Hillary pow-wow then that is exactly what will be happening.
I meant Omar not Tlaib as Omar is foreign born and has that brother/husband thing going on.
This is just too good to be true. A Democrat cat fight
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