The days of Congressional backroom deals are long gone, according to US Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and she believes her fellow Democrats will be in for "trouble" if they don't figure that out.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez spoke with New York Magazine, claiming that some senior members of the party are holding onto a political era of the past, where private deals were central to ensuring the passage of legislation during Congressional sessions. She believes those days are gone.
The ideological disparity was best illustrated in November, when Ms Ocasio-Cortez joined five other Democrats to vote against Joe Biden's $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. While the vote pitted her against the party, she says she wasn't trying to be a spoiler; she suspected that her fellow Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, would defect and kill the bill in the Senate if it was attached to Mr Biden's Build Back Better proposal. She was right.
“I have the utmost respect and confidence in the president, but I just felt like we called two different plays on this one,” she said. “I think that there is a sense among more senior members of Congress, who have been around in different political times, that we can get back to this time of buddy-buddy and backslapping and we’ll cut a deal and go into a room with some bourbon and some smoke and you’ll come out and work something out. I think there’s a real nostalgia and belief that that time still exists or that we can get back to that.”
Ms Ocasio-Cortez is worried that if Mr Biden does not use his executive power to pass legislation, Republicans in Congress – especially if the midterm elections hand them control of the House – will ensure he accomplishes little else of substance during his time in office.
Rather than seeking to pass legislation by trying to appeal to Mr Manchin's better angels, Ms Ocasio-Cortez believes Mr Biden would be better off using his executive power to build excitement among younger progressive voters ahead of the midterms.
"This is really about the collapse of support among young people, among the Democratic base, who are feeling that they worked overtime to get this president elected and aren’t necessarily being seen,” she told the magazine.
The House Progressive Caucus, of which Ms Ocasio-Cortez is a member, has called on Mr Biden to use his executive powers to help ease the burden of federal-student loans and healthcare costs and to expand protections for immigrants and the environment.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez said the Democrats may stand a fighting chance if they pull the trigger on those issues rather than just accepting they can't accomplish anything substantive with Mr Manchin and Ms Sinema in office.
“If the president does pursue and start to govern decisively using executive action and other tools at his disposal, I think we’re in the game,” she said. “But if we decide to just kind of sit back for the rest of the year and not change people’s lives — yeah, I do think we’re in trouble. So I don’t think that it’s set in stone. I think that we can determine our destiny here.”
