During a discussion on CNN this weekend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) argued that there just aren’t “moderates” among what we’re currently seeing out of the Republican Party.
She was speaking not long after the House and Senate finally approved a government funding deal to keep a federal shutdown at bay — for now. The stumbling block up to the final hours was House Republicans, who stuck for awhile to their demands for certain policy wins accompanying the necessary funding. In the end, some Republicans (the Matt Gaetz wing, essentially) stayed with those demands, and more House Democrats actually voted for the 45-day funding extension eventually put to a vote than House Republicans.
Before that point, Republicans had been trying to unify their party’s House members around partisan proposals like a jump-start to border wall construction. And in case the partisan obsession wasn’t clear behind these demands, here’s a portion of the Congressional Research Service’s summary for one of their proposals: “This section specifies that no funds are authorized to be appropriated for specified DHS activities, including a pilot program for alternatives to detention or purchasing electric vehicles.” They wanted to block funds from supporting alternatives to detention of migrants — and electric vehicles. Nearly 200 Republicans voted for that nonsense.
“There are not moderates in the Republican Party. There are just different degrees of fealty to Donald Trump,” Ocasio-Cortez insisted on CNN. “But it starts with a lot of fealty and then it goes to extreme fealty. And so we saw them go through every single iteration [for government funding], walk into every single wall — kind of run around the House like a Roomba, until they found a door that House Democrats opened. They finally realized that we should not shut down the government in order to deny trans servicemembers’ the ability to get health care, in order to deny female servicemembers’ the ability to get an abortion.”
AOC: There are not moderates in the Republican party. There are just different degrees of fealty to Donald Trump. But it starts with a lot of fealty and goes to extreme fealty… We saw them run around the House like a Roomba until they found a door that Democrats opened pic.twitter.com/gJ7HHYyTzC
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 1, 2023
