Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to know why she’s been assigned to “some of the busiest committees and four subcommittees” and suspects it’s all designed to keep her out of the spotlight.
The New York Democrat recently sat down with The New Yorker Radio Hour to discuss a wide range of topics when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came up.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez — billed by the magazine as “the hero of the left wing of the Democrats” — told host David Remnick that her assignments seem suspect.
“I was assigned to some of the busiest committees and four subcommittees,” she said July 5 for an interview published Tuesday. “So my hands are full. And sometimes I wonder if they’re trying to keep me busy.”
Mrs. Pelosi has repeatedly faced questions about the rising popularity of the freshman representative and other upstarts, although her answers have revealed tensions within the Democratic Party.
“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” the California Democrat said for a July 6 op-ed by The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. “But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
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The Hill, for example, described the intraparty feuding as follows: “Elections aren’t won on social media; they’re won at the ballot box. And importantly for Democrats, their voters are quite unlikely to be following along on Twitter.”
“That public ’whatever’ is called public sentiment,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez responded on Twitter to the Times’ op-ed. “And wielding the power to shift it is how we actually achieve meaningful change in this country.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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