At first glance, this headline in New York might seem to convey that her worship Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was finally learning something about the real world:
So maybe Democrats should move back to the middle? Of course not. The problem, from her point of view, is that Biden has been too timid, and didn’t simply steamroll Joe Manchin and go full progressive.
“I have the utmost respect and confidence in the president, but I just felt like we called two different plays on this one,” Ocasio-Cortez 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.”
“We need to acknowledge that this isn’t just about middle of the road, an increasingly narrow band of independent voters. 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 said.
Ocasio-Cortez and the other 97 members of the House Progressive Caucus are calling on Biden to issue executive orders to enact environmental protections, lower health-care costs, cancel federal student-loan debts, and expand protections for immigrants.
“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.”
The main thing progressives want right now is for President Biden to declare a “climate emergency,” and use the National Emergencies Act, the Defense Production Act, and other standby delegations of power to the executive branch to implement the Green New Deal that has no chance of passing Congress. And somehow AOC and others will call this “democracy.”
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