Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has spoken out after video emerged appearing to show House Republican Lauren Boebert engaging in what the New York congresswoman described as “sexually lewd acts” in a Colorado theater on September 10.
Boebert and a male companion were thrown out of the Buell Theatre in Denver after repeatedly vaping, using a cell phone and “causing a disturbance” during a performance of musical Beetlejuice.
Surveillance footage from inside the theater appeared to show Boebert’s male accomplice groping her breasts, and then being groped in turn by the Republican firebrand. In a statement, Boebert apologized for her behavior, which she claimed “fell short of my values,” but made no reference to the alleged sexual acts.
Ocasio-Cortez responded to the controversy in a one-minute video posted to her 323,000 TikTok followers on Thursday, in response to a viewer’s question.
She commented: "All I gotta say is I can’t go out to lunch in Florida in my free time, not doing anything, just eating outside and it’s wall-to-wall Fox News coverage and then you have a member of Congress engaging is sexually lewd acts in a public theater and they got nothing to say.”
“I danced to Phoenix once in college and it was like all over the place. But putting on a whole show of their own at Beetlejuice and there’s nothing? I’m just saying be consistent. That’s all I’m asking for. Equal treatment. I don’t expect it, but come on.”
Obama had a 60 vote supermajority in the Senate before Ted Kennedy died, and after his death, Harry Reid said they’d wait for the Republican guy to get seated before voting on the ACA. SUPER. MAJORITY. When is a Democratic supermajority going to happen in the Senate again?
Yeah, they passed the HEROES Act in 2020 when there was no chance of it defeating a guaranteed Trump veto. Why didn’t they pass it again when they had a trifecta 2021-2022? They’ll pass doomed-to-fail symbolic legislation all day long, but when there’s a chance at doing some real good, they always delay too long, deliver a gutted husk of what they promised, or apparently just forget to get around to it.
On student loans, Biden didn’t promise full student loan forgiveness. In fact, he campaigned promising not to do any substantial student loan forgiveness. When his staff and influential people on the Hill finally convinced him to do something on federal student loans, it was not blanket forgiveness. It wasn’t even the $50k that they thought they could realistically justify in court. It was $10-20k, and means-tested at that (because Dems can’t do anything without their precious means testing to prove that they’re financially conservative).
Bill Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, with a 55/45 GOP majority in the Senate, and something like a 20-vote GOP majority in the House. He could have vetoed it if he wanted to, if he thought it wouldn’t get overridden. This means either:
I’m not sure which option is more damning, but frankly I think both are true. The Clinton Administration explicitly pushed to the right (which they called “triangulation”) after they got whooped in the '94 midterms, and the party has continued pushing right ever since.
On your argument that not voting for the Dems won’t do any good: The only way to make a party listen to you is to withhold your votes; until you do so, they’ll take you for granted. In the 80s, the radical right demonstrated that they’d sit out elections if they didn’t have sufficiently fascist and/or stupid candidates to vote for - now they’re running the show.
The problem is that the Democratic party establishment does not care if they are the majority. In fact, they’d prefer it if they weren’t. They are first and foremost a fundraising operation. If they win, then they actually have to do something good for us, which generally runs contrary to the interests of the party’s largest donors. They could have made PR and DC states in the first half of Biden’s term - that would have been a lay-up, guaranteeing them some hope of competitiveness in the Senate in the coming decades. So why didn’t they?
The result of what you’re arguing for is a continuing leisurely descent into fascism, at which point we’d hopefully get a major correction. I’m saying let’s cut out the slow leisurely descent part and get a new left-wing party that is actually left-wing. Because with two right-wing parties in power, there’s no hope of turning left until they’re gone.