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WASHINGTON – President Nancy Pelosi said she has no followers in Congress. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, retorted that she and three other new liberal students, darlings of the left, collectively known as "the squad," hold the party's real power .
Six months after the entry of the new House to the Democratic majority, long-standing tensions between the speaker and the workforce – representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts – burst into flames, sparked a wave of criticism of Pelosi among liberal activists and reopened a debate within the party on how best to stand up to President Trump.
The fire was fueled by a $ 4.6 billion border aid package passed by Congress which, according to the Quartet, gave power to Mr. Trump's immigration crackdown. . But the forest was already a soldering box, drained by the debate that had lasted for months on the indictment, the previous filings with Ms. Omar and Ms. Tlaib and the Green New Deal Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, and debates imminent $ 15 per hour. draft law on the minimum wage and financing for the control of immigration and customs.
The quarrel is all the more notable as it pits Mrs. Pelosi, the Liberal MP from San Francisco, who is the most powerful woman elected in American history, to a group of democrat and progressive women of color who broke their own Most diverse class barriers to sitting in the House.
"It's an inevitable tension between some progressives with a priority, their ideology, and a speaker with many priorities, including preserving the majority in the House, electing a Democratic president against Trump, and responding to the consensus of his caucus," he said. Steve Israel, Democrat and former representative of New York. "To the extent that it distracts Donald Trump's attention and becomes a circular firing group among Democrats, he can be deadly."
Others see an old guard defending itself against powerful young voices demanding change.
"These new members are breaking through, building a movement, and the more they gain power, the more persuasive they will be to Pelosi," said Brian Fallon, former spokesman for Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton.
The setback began when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd questioned Pelosi about the team's fury over border assistance. The speaker noted that the group had managed to persuade no other Democrat to join them last month to vote against the House's version of the bill, which restricted the way the administration could spend the money and required standards of care in immigration detention centers.
"All these people have their audience and their Twitter universe," Pelosi told Dowd in a weekend interview with The Times. "But they did not have followers. They are four people and the number of votes they have obtained. "
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Queen's Congressman who upset a Democrat candidate over 20 years in power and who has earned a reputation as a declared communication brand for social media and social media in the corridors Congress, responded fiercely to a series of publications on Twitter. – a public demonstration of defiance to the leader of his party, his eldest.
"This audience is called" public sentiment ", she wrote to her more than 4.7 million followers in a message it has been re-circulated 10,000 times and "loved" by 65,000 people. "And using the power to change this is the way we are actually achieving meaningful change in this country."
Ms. Omar intervened with a tweet of solidarity. "Patetico!" She wrote on his personal Twitter account, with over a million followers. "You know that they're just salty about the WHO that has the power to change the" public sentiment "these days, sis, sorry not sorry."
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, went much further, claiming in a series of tweets that her boss and her first-term colleagues were better than Ms. Pelosi's, that the Democratic leaders did not go out of their way. were unwilling to fight for their principles, and that the speaker managed to win no Democratic victory while evading Trump's impeachment procedure.
"Pelosi says we can not focus on removal because it's a distraction from kitchen table problems," Chakrabarti said. wrote. "But I challenge you to find voters who can name just one thing the Democrats in the House have done for their kitchen table this year. What does this legislative brain do?
The exchanges have less to do with the ideological differences between Ms. Pelosi and the younger generation of progressives than their divergent styles and programs.
Ms. Pelosi, whose legislative triumph includes adopting the Affordable Care Act in the House in 2010, is committed to using the power of House Democrats to challenge Mr. Trump by introducing a bill that would please as many Democrats as possible, including the more than two dozen moderate legislators elected in constituencies led by the President in 2016. She maintained the United Fractional Caucus on Health Care, Security of Weapons Measures. fire, electoral reform and immigration, while differences persist over the desirability of dismissing Mr. Trump, a step forward. has up to now refused to approve.
The speaker also expressed the underlying resentment of the Democratic legislators towards Mrs Ocasio-Cortez and her group, whom they consider using their megaphone to sow intraparty divisions and fine-tune their own brands without obtaining results for the democrats.
Ms. Pelosi seemed to allude to this on Monday when she was asked to clarify her comments to Ms. Dowd.
"It was not disdainful; It was a statement of fact, "Pelosi told a reporter in San Francisco on Monday, noting that while most Democrats in the House had" voted for the protection of children "by supporting the UN's humanitarian aid project. Room, the team had chosen not to do it. "There were four who opposed the bill and they are the only four who voted against it. All I said was that no one followed their example.
"They have an audience in the audience," Pelosi added. "I'm just talking to Congress."
The quartet redefined their party's message by offering multi-billion dollar ideas, such as the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and tuition-free universities, which garnered broad rhetorical support especially from Democratic candidates for the presidency. But they still have to translate their vision into concrete legislative achievements.
The team and its allies say that they are exploiting the true energy of the Democratic base with their uncompromising and shameless positions.
"Representing the movement that really helped put everyone in power in Congress and give Pelosi its seat is crucial, they have been at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the world. Congress, "said Leah Greenberg, the executive director of Indivisible, a progressive advocacy group.
Liberal activists have tried to use the speaker's comments to provoke outrage, as well as to raise money to prepare primaries against practicing Democrats whom they consider insufficiently liberal.
"The AOC and the team have changed the entire national debate," said an email telling the story of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which offered a colorful sticker "I STAND WITH AOC" to anyone who donated of their work "electing more AOC in Congress". . "
Fallon, now executive director of the popular progressive group Demand Justice, said Ocasio-Cortez had demonstrated a unique ability to draw public attention to candidates and liberal causes, as she has did last week. when she visited a Texas immigration detention center. But Ms. Pelosi has a totally different mandate, he explained, that her recent comments may have been designed to express subtly.
"I think more than anything, it's a challenge for this rising wing of the party: if they really want to turn into a protest wing and let the leaders follow their strategy, they must develop their support base and leave it without option" , he said.
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