Pelosi clashes with progressive ‘squad’ in House
WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said they have no following in Congress. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York shot back that she and three of her fellow liberal freshmen, darlings of the left known collectively as “the squad,” are wielding the real power in the party.
Six months into the new House Democratic majority, longsimmering tensions between the speaker and the squad — Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — have boiled over in the most public of ways, setting off a flurry of criticism of Pelosi among liberal activists and reinvigorating a debate within the party about how best to stand up to President Donald Trump.
The fire was lit by a $4.6 billion border aid package passed by Congress that the quartet argued had empowered Trump’s immigration crackdown. But the forest already was a tinderbox, dried by the monthslong debate over impeachment, earlier dustups with Omar and Tlaib and over Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, and looming debates over a $15-an-hour minimum wage bill and funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The squabble is all the more notable because it pits Pelosi, the liberal San Francisco congresswoman who is the most powerful elected woman in American history, against a group of progressive Democratic women of color who have broken barriers of their own as part of the most diverse class ever to serve in the House.
“This is an inevitable tension between a few progressives with one priority, which is 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 her caucus,” said Steve Israel, a Democrat and former representative of New York. “To the extent that it distracts from Donald Trump and becomes a circular firing squad among Democrats, it can be lethal.”
Others see an old guard defending itself against powerful young voices demanding change.
“Those freshman members are breaking through, and they’re building a movement, and the more power that movement gains, the more persuasive they will be to Pelosi,” said Brian Fallon, a former spokesman for Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Hillary Clinton.
The contretemps began when Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist, asked Pelosi about the squad’s fury over the border aid package. The speaker noted that the group had failed to persuade any other Democrats to join them last month in voting against the House’s version of
the bill, which placed restrictions on how the administration could spend the money and demanded standards of care at migrant detention centers.
“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” Pelosi told Dowd in an interview published over the weekend by the Times. “But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got.”
Ocasio-Cortez, the Queens congresswoman who upset a 20-year Democratic incumbent in a primary and who has carved out a reputation as an outspoken and social media-savvy firebrand in the halls of Congress, responded tartly in a string of Twitter posts — a public show of defiance to the leader of her party 50 years her senior.
“That public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment,” she wrote to her more than 4.7 million followers in a message that was recirculated 10,000 times and “liked” by 65,000 people. “And wielding the power to shift it is how we actually achieve meaningful change in this country.”
Omar chimed in with a tweet of solidarity. “Patetico!” she wrote on her personal Twitter account, with more than 1 million followers. “You know they’re just salty about WHO is wielding the power to shift ‘public sentiment’ these days, sis. Sorry not sorry.”
The back-and-forth has less to do with ideological differences between Pelosi and the young crop of progressives than their divergent styles and agendas.
Pelosi, whose legislative triumphs include muscling the Affordable Care Act through the House in 2010, has focused on using the House Democrats’ power to challenge Trump by advancing legislation that appeals to the broadest possible swath of Democrats, including the more than two dozen moderate lawmakers elected in districts carried by the president in 2016.