[ In an interview, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discusses her
call for Clarence Thomas’s impeachment, Joe Biden’s reelection
prospects, and the need to dismantle the filibuster.]
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AOC: THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S RIGHTWARD TURN IS “A PROFOUND
MISCALCULATION”  
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AOC Interview by David Sirota
April 11, 2023
Jacobin
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_ In an interview, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discusses her call
for Clarence Thomas’s impeachment, Joe Biden’s reelection
prospects, and the need to dismantle the filibuster. _

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Since her upset primary victory in 2018, congresswoman Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has been an outspoken champion of progressive
causes, from abolishing ICE to Medicare for All to a Green New Deal.
Along with fellow members of the Squad and Senator Bernie Sanders
(I-VT), the Biden administration has seen AOC attempt to balance
support of the Biden administration and Democratic leadership against
an increasingly extreme Republican Party, on the one hand, with
criticism of Democrats’ disturbing record on immigration, health
care, and much else on the other.

In a wide-ranging interview with _Jacobin _editor at large David
Sirota
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Ocasio-Cortez discussed the recent revelations about Supreme Court
justice Clarence Thomas seemingly accepting bribes, her
disappointments with the Biden administration, how the Left can win
against right-wing super PACs, and what’s next in the fights for
action on climate change and Medicare for All. This transcript has
been lightly edited for clarity and length.

DAVID SIROTA

ProPublica just broke the story of Clarence Thomas accepting luxury
private jet and yacht trips from a billionaire Republican donor. It
sounds like something out of a cartoon caricature of corruption.
It’s a story that seems to encapsulate all the Supreme Court
corruption that everyone senses.

But now it’s right out in the open, and you’re calling for
Clarence Thomas’s impeachment. Are you going to draft those articles
of impeachment, and do you expect to have the support of many, if not
most, of the House Democratic Caucus?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

I think this is an emergency; I think that this is a crisis. I think
we’ve had a crisis for some time on the Supreme Court. Congress is
out of session for the next week, and that does give Democrats some
time to strategize.

I do think articles need to be introduced; if we decide strategically
that the actual author of those articles and who introduces them may
not be me, that’s fine. I will support impeachment. But if no
one’s going to introduce them, I would certainly be open to doing so
and drafting them myself. I think this has gone far, far beyond any
sort of acceptable standard in any democracy, let alone American
democracy.

DAVID SIROTA

Let’s turn to the 2024 election. You won office through a contested
Democratic primary, one in which very few pundits and party operatives
said you even had a chance to win. With that history in mind, do you
believe more House Democratic incumbents should face primaries? Do you
believe that the primary process is healthy for the Democratic Party?
There’s another school of thought that says it weakens Democratic
candidates and the party should work to try to stop those primaries.

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

I do believe that primaries are healthy. When I first got to the
House, not just through winning a primary, but when I was sworn in
afterward — even just a public acknowledgment that a primary process
involving incumbents is legitimate and healthy for the party — it
was just completely taboo, and me supporting that, including
supporting primary challengers . . . and afterward, the party declared
war right back, and it declared war not just on my candidacy but also
on progressives writ large. We really saw that last cycle,
particularly with the overwhelming number of AIPAC [American Israel
Public Affairs Committee] funds that targeted progressives, including
incumbents who had stances that were in alignment with respect for
Palestinian human rights.

I understand that it goes both ways. My first reelection, the party
establishment mounted a $5 million primary challenge against me. So
I’m aware that saying that primaries are a good thing and healthy
for the party also means that I may be on the receiving end of those
things, but I still maintain that position.

DAVID SIROTA

AIPAC coordinated millions of dollars in super PAC spending against
progressives, as you allude to, last election cycle, some early on in
Pennsylvania, but their spending helped defeat folks like Jessica
Cisneros, Donna Edwards, and Nina Turner. What can progressive
candidates and incumbents do to overcome that kind of spending this
cycle?

Not everyone can be as well-known as, for instance, you are. There’s
this idea of, you go out and you do the best you can, but you’ve got
to raise your profile to raise the money in order to be competitive.
So for progressive candidates for the House in this election cycle,
how would you advise them to deal with the possibility of huge money
being spent against them in a primary?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

First and foremost, money is not ultimately the end-all be-all of how
a person can win an election. For a very long time, it has been the
case that the person who raises the most money wins. However, I do
believe that, in the technological and tactical evolution of
campaigning, particularly in the progressive movement, we are starting
to see more people win while being outspent.

We just had Brandon Johnson win the mayoralty in Chicago, and he was
outspent two-to-one on television, and yet he won. We saw Karen Bass
running for the mayoral seat in Los Angeles, and she was running
against a billionaire, very well-funded. And she was still able to win
it.

What this is about is building a very sophisticated infrastructure in
the progressive movement that focuses on field operations and
professionalizing how we can share that across the movement, because
far too many campaigns start from scratch. That’s something I’ve
been thinking about a lot and working on. I have a PAC, Courage to
Change, that focuses on down-ballot elections and supporting
progressives who are in that boat where they aren’t able to tap into
these high-net-worth fundraising circles to build a super-well-funded
campaign.

When I ran the first time, it was the same thing. You’ve got to know
how to run a street fight in a really professional way, and it needs
to be down to precincts. It needs to be down to blocks. You need to
know your path to victory. This can’t just be a “post and pray”
approach. We need to know what we are doing, and thankfully, I think
that there’s been a lot of progress in that in that respect. But it
is something that must be an ongoing commitment and project.

DAVID SIROTA

In the last few months, President Joe Biden and his administration
have broken a railworkers’ strike. They’ve repealed Washington
DC’s criminal justice reforms. They’ve rejected a petition to
lower the price of a major cancer drug and authorized a huge fossil
fuel drilling project in Alaska.

What are you and other progressives in the House planning to do about
this move to the right? And speaking of primaries, do you believe it
would be healthy for Biden in his reelection bid to face a primary?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

I have always stated that I will never be a person who says there
should not be a primary. Because of the way that I got to Congress, it
would be deeply hypocritical for me to ever be against the existence
of a primary process for a candidacy. Just on principle, that is where
I stand.

I do believe that some of the latest developments coming from the
Biden administration are highly concerning — increasingly concerning
— and not just from an ideological perspective, not just from a
substance perspective, which is the most important, but also from a
political perspective.

I think it is extremely risky and very perilous should the Biden
administration forget who it was that put him over the top. When you
look at the places — not just abstract levels of turnout, not just
where numbers came from, but these swing places that gave Joe Biden
the edge on an [Electoral College] victory — it was young people
that that won him this election, communities of color, high turnout
areas. This lurch to the right at a time when the Right is scrambling
and lost in the desert on how to even win an election after these
stunning losses — I think it’s a profound miscalculation. And it
is quite dangerous.

The pushback on the Biden administration’s authorization of the
Willow Project has been very encouraging. It is important. We saw
Biden’s approval ratings dip for the first time in a significant way
recently, and I believe that it was after the approval of the Willow
Project, and that some of these decisions to lurch to the right have
contributed to that.

So what we really need right now is having that continued, outside
vocal organizing that allows us, when we are approaching the
administration, to say, “This is why this is happening,” so we can
pull and point to grassroots movements that are telling that story as
our evidence. Because if we just come up with that abstract claim,
they’re just going to think that it’s conjecture: “Of course
you’re going to say that; this is what you already believe.”

I think it emphasizes the importance of that grassroots organizing,
because it gives us the ammunition and the evidence to tell the story
about why this is important. I do believe that the Biden
administration historically, particularly under chief of staff Ron
Klain, understood that. I do believe that they that they do not take
for granted the role of young people and the role of progressive
turnout in their 2020 victory. The key is maintaining the boundary and
letting them know that this is not something to be taken for granted.

DAVID SIROTA

The Squad has been billed as a bloc of votes that holds the Democratic
caucus and the Biden administration accountable and create that
boundary. At one point, you had said, “In any other country, Joe
Biden and I would not be in the same party,” which I think is a
commentary on the way our country’s politics are set up.

However, you, for instance, have voted 91 percent of the time with the
Biden administration. That includes votes on the railworkers’
strike, spending $40 billion on the Ukraine war, and billions of
dollars for microchip companies that have been criticized for using
the cash to do buybacks. You and a group of progressives also didn’t
withhold your vote on the American Rescue Plan when the Biden
administration abandoned the minimum wage.

So the question is, how can you hold your party accountable or create
that boundary with the Biden administration when you and progressives
in the Congress are oftentimes voting for what the party leadership
wants, and very rarely — sometimes, but rarely — holding out your
vote when the party really needs it?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

I want to address the two parts of that question. I want to emphasize
that there are times where we do break with the party, for example, on
Build Back Better. That was a yearlong war we had inside our party.

There were moments in the lead-up to that Build Back Better and
bipartisan infrastructure vote where the president of the United
States was on the speaker phone with us saying, “You need to do
this.” The pretense that the president had on this was, “Vote for
BIF [the bipartisan infrastructure bill], and trust me, I will get
Build Back Better across the line.” The framing here, to give a
window into how the internal politics and party works is, “Do you
trust us or not? Do you trust this leadership?” This is Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, the president of United States, the vice president,
members of the cabinet. They use a collective environment; this is not
a private conversation.

It’s almost like an invitation, to try to say in front of everybody
and to stand up to the Speaker and to the president and say, “This
is not a matter of trust at all. This is a matter of votes. And it’s
not that I don’t trust you — it’s that I don’t trust Joe
Manchin. And I don’t know if I trust anybody to be able to bring
consistency out of a person who does not have any.”

But some of these votes also speak to that progressive infrastructure
that we’re talking about. When it comes to the rail vote, for
example, we worked very closely with all elements of the railworkers;
not just the Teamsters, not just some of the other formal unions, but
also those members of the unions that were rebelling against the
initial round of agreements. It was in tandem with these
organizations, RWU [Railroad Workers United] and some of those folks
that were leading the fight on opposing that initial agreement to a
terrible contract. Those were the folks that we were working with in
developing our organizing strategy around this.

It was following the actual railworkers’ lead in both camps. This
was not just about traditional union leadership, but also
rank-and-file grassroots leadership that we tried to determine our
strategy with. We worked with Senator Bernie Sanders, and we worked
with many others, saying, “How do you all want us to proceed?”

The initial push was to rubber-stamp this agreement with no attempt at
getting paid leave. Procedurally, what we were asked to do by the rank
and file is, “Get us a paid leave vote.” That was the
determination. That was the organizing leading up to that vote. That
was the request that was made of me, and that is what I agreed to
deliver on.

There is a difference between the spontaneous digital response versus
the actual organizing rooms and people that are directly impacted by
this. When you look after the vote, folks like RWU were saying,
“This is what we asked them to do.” I think that got drowned out
by the noise of people operating more on the theory of the situation.

But ultimately, there are moments when there are going to be internal
disagreements about strategy. It is so important, especially among the
Left, that we develop a discernment between when there are differences
in strategy — sometimes they are intense, and sometimes they are
rigorous and vigorous disagreements — versus equating that
difference in strategy with a 180-degree change in commitment to our
vision and our principles.

There is so much money and so much interest invested in sowing chaos
on the Left. We have to realize that the same tools that are good for
us, and the way that we can use the internet to bypass some of the
traditional structures that have gate-kept our media, gate-kept our
political organizing, etc. — these are still algorithms owned by
billionaires who want to incentivize internal conflict. And they do. I
believe there are times when we have fallen for it.

That being said, criticism is fair, and it’s okay. But if I were to
ask for something . . .  A lot of times this organizing and reaction
happens after a vote. Before and in the lead-up to a vote, we are
often asking some of our grassroots partners for a position. A lot of
times, and I think that this is often for resource reasons, that
organizing doesn’t happen until after the flash point has already
occurred. What is most useful or beneficial is for that engagement to
happen prior to a vote. Because, for example, with the rail vote, the
only partners that I had leading up to that were railworkers. And if
that’s what they asked us to do, then that’s what we did.

DAVID SIROTA

Your point about differences in tactics being interpreted as a
difference in values is a huge issue. I think there are a lot of
people who look out at politics and see so much money invested in so
many different outcomes that aren’t good for people. They perceive
both parties selling them out in different ways: the Republicans being
super extremist, the Democrats maybe saying the right thing but
oftentimes not delivering.

Just as a follow-up: When people are, from your perspective,
misinterpreting a difference in tactics and strategy for a difference
in values, do you blame them? Why shouldn’t they see it that way, if
they feel like the political system has been selling them out for ten,
twenty, thirty years?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

I don’t blame a lot of people for that. I do blame some, because I
believe that there are folks and leaders in the space that know better
and they fan flames that they know are disingenuous for personal gain.
There is a lot of incentive in that when there is an economy that has
developed that is based on clicks, views, and attention. And we know
the thing that attracts that more than anything else is conflict. So
there are financial incentives for certain people, I believe, whose
income revenue relies on that to stoke conflict.

It’s a re-creation of a lot of what we see in mass media. Mass media
is so Left-Right heavy. It’s so Republican-versus-Democrat heavy,
precisely because it drives viewership. When you get into more niche
audiences, it’s the same thing: similar conflicts can be driven by
amplifying those sometimes-disingenuous takes to fan intraleft
conflict.

I want to also be thoughtful, because I don’t want to equate that
with saying any criticism of our decisions is just playing into the
hands of someone else. There are multiple things that can be true at
the same time. This is something that we need to really develop and
talk out, because a lot of these decisions are not last minute. They
may happen last minute, but we can often see that they’re coming
from a long way out. We just don’t know exactly when.

Not just me as a member, but I believe that as movements, you see
certain tensions happening. This scale up to the rail vote was months
in the making. So we had been in communication with workers for months
about, how do we want to see this unfold? And the number-one thing
that emerged from those conversations, the thing that was most
important, was securing paid leave and also, tactically, what we were
materially capable of.

Theoretically, in talking about the strike, I understand why someone
would have [a different] position, but we need to be honest with
ourselves about what something like a wildcat strike takes. Are we
ready for that? Are the seeds sown for that? Sometimes they are.
We’ve seen that with the teachers’ unions and what happened in
West Virginia and what’s happened in Los Angeles. But sometimes a
workforce may not be prepared for that. And if a movement isn’t,
then we have to decide what other tactics we’re going to use.

DAVID SIROTA

Health care seems to have completely fallen off the Democratic
Party’s agenda. President Joe Biden hasn’t even mentioned the
public option that he promised during the campaign. The health care
crisis is getting worse, and it seems like the best that the
Democratic Party can agree on is to promise to throw more money at
health insurance companies through the Affordable Care Act exchanges,
while the Biden administration is also continuing to privatize
Medicare through Medicare Advantage.

All of this is only a few years after Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign
seemed to galvanize the real prospect for a Medicare for All push. Why
do you believe the Medicare for All push, at least right now, seems to
have stalled? Why does it feel like health care isn’t even really an
issue for the Democratic Party right now?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

The insurance lobby is so incredibly powerful. If I had to think about
the top, it would probably be fossil fuels, but pharma and insurance
are way up there. I also believe that Big Pharma and the insurance
companies have a broader number of members that can be influenced by
that. With Big Oil, it’s predominantly Republicans and then a chunk
of certain Democrats. But with insurance, it’s much broader across
both parties.

When Bernie ran on Medicare for All in 2016, it created an enormous
amount of electoral fervor that led a lot of members to cosponsor
Medicare for All. But I believe that when push comes shove, the number
of people who are willing to fight for Medicare for All is probably
less than the number of cosponsors on that bill. And frankly, even if
we had a floor vote on it, because of the lack of prospects in the
Senate, I also think there would be a lot of disingenuous votes for it
when people know that it’s going to a graveyard.

I do believe that we are approaching an interesting political window.
We just saw an unprecedented, once-in-a-generation shift in leadership
of the Democratic Party, particularly in the House. It was pretty well
known what Pelosi’s position on this was; she has a very strong
record about trying to strengthen the ACA, but through expanding what
ultimately are subsidies to insurance.

Going back and putting that pressure on, whether it’s through
primaries or whether it’s through putting that pressure on every
member of the Democratic caucus to go on record on Medicare for All,
that I think is where we are at. Also, this is an issue where perhaps,
among many elected Democrats, they just think it’s too pie in the
sky right now.

I also think a lot of this has to do with the Senate filibuster. There
are so many things that people take positions on but they don’t
really put energy into, because as long as the filibuster exists . . .
it’s this idea of, “If we can’t even get basic gun safety past a
filibuster, what can we do for universal health care?” So providing
and mounting a really strong fight to dismantle the filibuster in the
Senate has to be a precursor to any fight for universal health care
and for guaranteed health care.

Now, I don’t think that it’s this or that; I think we need to be
building both of these things at the same time. But we also need to be
real about the tactical reality of how we make it happen. We can’t
make anything happen unless we can dismantle the filibuster, or elect
ten more Democrats to the Senate [who support] more Medicare for All
and keep the entire caucus. . . . That, to me, seems far less
realistic than pressuring the party to dismantle the filibuster.

DAVID SIROTA

Scientists are warning that climate change poses an existential threat
for all life on Earth, telling us we’ve got to halt all new fossil
fuel development. And in response, Congress did the Inflation
Reduction Act, which includes both lots of subsidies for green energy
but also a big potential to expand fossil fuel development. And as we
discussed, the Biden administration just approved this Willow Project
in Alaska.

Looking back on the last two years, on the whole, has the Democratic
Party helped the fight against climate change, or has it made the
problem worse? Has it taken the problem as seriously enough as it
deserves to be taken?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

I’m a major critic of the party. I think the Biden administration
has been very disappointing on climate. In the first twenty-five
months of the Trump presidency versus the first twenty-five months of
the Biden presidency, Biden has authorized more fossil fuel permits.
This is a serious issue. The Biden administration is failing on
immigration as well, but that’s a separate conversation.

However, it’s this duality of multiple things being true at the same
time. The IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act and the climate provisions
in it, is the biggest action in American history with these
substantive and structural shifts that will, I believe, unlock
significant developments on climate, clean energy, and other types of
infrastructure.

But compared to the science of the situation, it is both the biggest
thing we’ve ever done and also still not enough. That being said, I
don’t think that this fight is going to happen in one fell swoop, in
one piece of legislation. I think it’s going to take, say, several
major knockout victories, but we have accomplished one of them.
We’re going to see a lot of the benefits of that. But this is an
infrastructure investment that takes time to build out and create
those jobs.

_David Sirota is editor-at-large at Jacobin. He edits the Lever and
previously served as a senior adviser and speechwriter on Bernie
Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign._

* Interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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