AOC Sets Her Sights on Pelosi and Schumer: It's Time for Them To Go
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have to go because they’re political dinosaurs and the party needs new blood to take the reins.
Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the far-left “squad” of female lawmakers, also dissed the retreads who Joe Biden picked for his transition team, saying they’re the same holdovers employed by former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
All this grousing affirms reports that a civil war is brewing within the Democratic Party between the centrists (represented by Pelosi) and the far-left progressives represented by AOC and Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept that the House and Senate leaders in her party have done nothing to groom the “next generation of leadership.”
As a result, she lamented that the Democratic Party is centered around Pelosi, 80, and Schumer, 70, and this is untenable because it hampers the party’s ability to evolve.
“A lot of this is not just about these two personalities, but also about the structural shifts that these two personalities have led in their time in leadership,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept.
“The structural shifts of power in the House, both in process and rule, to concentrate power in party leadership of both parties, frankly, but in Democratic Party leadership to such a degree that an individual member has far less power than they did 30, 40, 50 years ago.”
AOC said this entrenched leadership model has caused many “really talented members of Congress that do come along” to leave and run for state office instead, where they can make a mark instead of being part of a herd.
Pelosi has suggested that her upcoming term as speaker will be her last. But Ocasio-Cortez dismissed speculation that she wants Pelosi’s job once the octogenarian steps down.
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“The House is extraordinarily complex and I’m not ready,” she said. “It can’t be me. I know that I couldn’t do that job.”
However, AOC said she’s worried that the far-left faction of the Democratic Party has no one on deck who’s ready to step in after Pelosi leaves.
“The left isn’t really making a plan for that either,” she said. “So I do think that it’s something that we really need to think about.”
When asked her opinion about Biden’s transition team, Ocasio-Cortez said, “It’s horrible.”
Biden’s HUD Pick Once Wrote a Letter of Support for Judge Who Beat His Wife and Later Killed Her https://t.co/o2D7WfaldW
— Brave Heart (@throughthygrace) December 11, 2020
According to AOC, a Biden administration would basically be a third Obama term or Clinton 3.0.
The Biden transition team has quietly added dozens of people from corporate giants Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Facebook and Google, Politico reported.
“The Biden administration is bringing back a lot of Obama appointees, which depending on where you are in the party, may sound nice, I guess,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“But I think what a lot of people fail to remember is that we now have a Biden administration that’s bringing back a lot of Obama appointees, but when Obama was making appointments, he was bringing back a lot of Clinton appointees.”
Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t just want a Democrat in the White House; she wants a revolution. And she said that won’t happen if you keep bringing back the same establishment Democrats who were “a huge reason why we got Donald Trump in the first place.”
AOC warned that reprising the same retreads from past administrations could cause Trump — or a Trump-like figure — to retake the White House because of Americans’ “extreme disdain for this moneyed political establishment that rules Washington.”
In short, Ocasio-Cortez is saying that if Biden gets installed as president, he’ll get no help from progressives. And his days will be numbered.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
