Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hits back at Nancy Pelosi after she accuses far-left Democrats of living in a 'Twitter world'
Freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushed back against comments made by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slamming her and other far-left radical newcomers for voting against a $4.6 billion humanitarian border bill that President Trump signed into law on Monday.
Garnering support from moderate Democrats, Congress was able to approve the bill before Pelosi lambasted the progressive wing of her party for not throwing support behind the humanitarian assistance effort, Fox News reports.
“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.”
However, Ocasio-Cortez had a considerably different outlook.
“That public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment,” Ocasio-Cortez retorted on Twitter. “And wielding the power to shift it is how we actually achieve meaningful change in this country.”
The New York rep. went on to defend her use of social media as well as her fellow freshmen, saying traditional methods -- as favored by senior lawmakers -- were often more expensive and time-consuming.
“I find it strange when members act as though social media isn’t important,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “They set millions of [dollars] on [fire] to run TV ads so people can see their message.
“I haven’t dialed for dollars *once* this year,” she added, “& have more time to do my actual job. Yet we’d rather campaign like it’s 2008.”
Furthermore, Ocasio Cortez doubled down against the Democrats who joined hands with Republicans on the spending bill intended to tackle the asylum crisis at the southern border.
“I don’t believe it was a good idea for Dems to blindly trust the Trump admin when so many kids have died in their custody. It’s a huge mistake,” she wrote. “This admin also refuses to hand over docs to Congress on the whereabouts of families. People’s lives are getting bargained, & for what?”
Author Ryan Grim in an op-ed in the Washington Post published on Friday, said that Ocasio Cortez thinks older Democrats are too eager to compromise with Republicans.
“Ocasio-Cortez told me that she treats Republicans like buffoons because that’s how they’ve behaved for as long as she can remember,” Grim writes. “’Even before I was of voting age, I saw Republicans accuse the Obamas of doing a ‘terrorist fist bump,’ so they’ve been clowns since I was a teen,’ she said.”
That said, Ocasio-Cortez's critics have called her out for her alleged hypocrisy after she opposed the border bill that was designed to address the same problems she had been complaining about in recent weeks.
“People like AOC create the disaster, refuse to fix it, vote against funding to help people and then go down there to attack the people who are saying to her, ‘We don’t have enough money, we don’t have enough facilities,’” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Fox News last week, calling Ocasio-Cortez "viciously dishonest."