Politics

Ocasio-Cortez: House Democrats’ Refusal To Impeach Is A Bigger Scandal Than Trump’s’ ‘Lawbreaking Behavior’

By Jesse Korman, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70354087

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested Saturday that House Democrats’ unwillingness to oust President Donald Trump is more scandalous than anything the president has done up to this point in his presidency.

Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive Democrats in the House have been poking and prodding the moderate members of their party to move more quickly on impeachment proceedings. She became more insistent Saturday night, telling her fellow Democrats to take impeachment more seriously.

“At this point, the bigger national scandal isn’t the president’s lawbreaking behavior — it is the Democratic Party’s refusal to impeach him for it,” she said in a tweet to her followers. Some of Ocasio-Cortez’s fellow Democrats dinged her on Twitter for making what they believe to be a false equivalence.

At this point, the bigger national scandal isn’t the president’s lawbreaking behavior – it is the Democratic Party’s refusal to impeach him for it.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 22, 2019

“It is one thing for a sitting president to break the law. It’s another to let him. The integrity of our democracy isn’t threatened when a president breaks the law. It‘s threatened when we do nothing about it,” she said in a follow-up tweet responding to the criticism.

House Democrats are trying their level-best to move forward on impeachment charges, but they have not gained much headway.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is opposed to launching an impeachment inquiry and has said it would be “divisive.” She resisted a formal House vote allowing the launch of an official impeachment inquiry, but House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler suggested an official probe is underway.

Ocasio-Cortez’s relationship with Pelosi is notoriously icy. The freshman lawmaker implied in a July interview that Pelosi singles out women of color and said the House speaker has been “disrespectful” toward “newly elected women of color” in Congress.

Pelosi, for her part, was quoted in a New York Times article in July taking a thinly veiled shot at Ocasio-Cortez and several other freshman Democrats who voted against a bill to help migrants at the border. She also reportedly dinged progressives in a private meeting that month for criticizing moderate members on social media.