Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has accused establishment Democrats of treating her “like shit” as progressive activists urged her to run for president in 2028.
In a 100-minute long video posted on Instagram, the 37-year-old congresswoman from New York said that the party had a “remarkable opportunity” to pass left-wing policies after the midterm elections. She also accused the party’s leadership of starving funds from left-wing candidates during the campaign.
“There’s this huge conversation about candidates that were under invested in,” Ocasio-Cortez said. She cited Angie Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who came within 240,000 votes of flipping Florida from red to blue, but ultimately lost to the Republican candidate Ashley Moody.
“If Angie Nixon had just had a little bit of that support, that outcome could have changed. But that money has to come from somewhere and it comes from these people,” Ocasio-Cortez said in reference to the party’s Senate leadership.
Reflecting on the period after she was first elected to Congress in 2018 at the age of 29, Ocasio-Cortez accused senior Democrats of being “horrifically cruel” to her. “I mean I was treated like shit,” she said. “Everybody took a swing at me.”
The Bronx congresswoman is seen as the likeliest progressive candidate to run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2028.
‘…Anyway, that’s why I’m excited to give Hakeem Jefferies my full and unconditioned support.’
(Did the article mention this? It’s paywalled for me.)
I can defend that. Jeffries is a nonentity; house democrats have been able to walk past him for 2 years. Schumer is far more of a problem, and has the contacts and connections to ratfuck anyone over anything. When Schumer wants to raise money and whip for Israel, he opens his Rolodex. When Jeffries wants to raise money and whip for Israel, he asks Schumer to open his Rolodex. Both need to go, but ousting Schumer as majority leader is step 1 towards that. You can disagree with the political calculus on that, but there is political calculus on that.
I’m not a parliamentary expert, but that doesn’t sound correct to me.
Doesn’t the speaker control who chairs each committee and what legislation makes it to the floor?
As speaker, Jeffries can – and will – put allies as chairs of committees to make sure that Medicare for All never gets out of committee. He could single-handedly prevent a vote to abolish ICE from taking place, even if a majority were in support. The speaker is third in line of succession to the presidency, and is arguably the most powerful position in the federal government after the President.
I don’t think your characterization matches reality at all.
I think he is not talking about what the speaker can do, but what sort of person Jeffries is personally. I can kind of see it, he interviews kind of like phone tree. So if he ‘leads’ like that then he may be a fairly mundane pass through for whatever most folks are going with. Others can and have meddled a lot, but he may just be background character enough to insert much of anything specific to the role.
But not crazy about the concept of a guy that I don’t think can think on his feet in being in such a high visibility role either way.
Did she say the bad treatment ended? She’s probably getting bullied to support him like everyone else.