It’s long been clear that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has very little knowledge of the Constitution. She sees our founding document as an impediment to her authoritarian plans to remake America. Too many silly rules, you see. All this talk, talk, talk, and nothing gets done.
That may very well be true. But those rules and all that talking serve a vital purpose; they make it possible for everyone who has an interest in what’s going on to have their say.
Radicals don’t understand the “process” and don’t want to. They think people who disagree with them should sit down and shut up. And that includes the president.
Related: Sorry, AOC, The Rich Already Pay Their Fair Share
AOC granted an interview to the New York Times and it was actually quite revealing.
There is an enormous amount of executive action that they’re sitting on that I think is underutilized. On student loans. We’ve got executive action on the table with respect to climate. There are certainly things that we can do with immigration.
So why are we taking this as a legislative compromise, when the opportunity is so much greater, or when Biden could do this stuff with a stroke of a pen, and is just reminding us that he’s choosing not to?
Joe Biden is many things, not many of them good, but at bottom, he’s an old-fashioned politician with a respect, even reverence, for traditions. A more modern Democratic president would almost certainly have nixed the filibuster by now. But Biden has resisted immense pressure from the radicals and protected it.
Biden also has tremendous respect for the separation of powers. He may be altering that view as his window to get anything done in Congress is closing rapidly, but he has said many times that there are issues that only Congress should deal with. He has resisted calls to end student loan debt. He also failed to take radical action by himself with regard to climate change. And while he failed to resist calls to legalize DREAMers, he still limited the number of people he legalized.
As radically as Joe Biden has governed the country, it’s still not good enough for AOC.
Democrats have a trifecta and have been unable to pass voting-rights protections. And so people can wring their hands and say “but Manchin” all they want, or “but the filibuster” all they want, but at the end of the day, what people see are the results of their actions and the results of investing their time.
We are up against political nihilism. The idea that nothing we do matters, because as long as I live in the Bronx, the political reality of this country is that no one’s going to fight for me. That is why it’s so important that we take some of these risks for our base.
Perhaps a real leader would tell the people in the Bronx to fight for themselves rather than wait for some vainglorious radical and social media star to do it for them.
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