House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy took multiple swings at House Democrats as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi struggles to wrangle with the more liberal elements of party.
“The majority has reached a new low,” McCarthy, a California Republican, told reporters Thursday. “I watch the news. A lot of the talk is about the war within this new ‘socialist Democratic Party.’ It’s interesting. In a few short months, I watched the speaker and a lot of those freshmen smile on the cover of the Rolling Stone magazine. And now I’m just watching stones being thrown at one another.”
McCarthy added the dysfunction was impeding legislative and policy business of Congress, alluding to comments from New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, who publicly questioned Pelosi’s leadership on social media.
“Now I understand within this new ‘Democratic socialist party,’ they’ve got a big fight going on in their conference. They have real challenges to bring up the most basic things,” McCarthy said. “I understand that it’s not just a family feud, it’s now become a war.”
Chakrabarti’s tweets were provoked by an interview Pelosi gave the New York Times last weekend in which she criticized “the Squad,” a quartet of freshman lawmakers including Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” Pelosi said. “But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
“All these articles want to claim what a legislative mastermind Pelosi is, but I’m seeing way more strategic smarts from freshman members,” Chakrabarti wrote on Twitter in response. “Pelosi is just mad that she got outmaneuvered (again) by Republicans.”
Tensions between Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez have been souring since April, when the speaker spoke to several news outlets and downplayed the influence of the liberal firebrands. The relationship, however, went further south when Pelosi agreed to a $4.6 billion emergency funding bill for border security and to improve conditions at migrant detention centers, which liberals did not support.
Pelosi has refused to walk back her remarks on numerous occasions.
“I have no regrets about anything,” she told reporters this week. “Regret is not what I do.”
Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, has continued the feud.
“When these comments first started, I kind of thought that she was keeping the progressive flank at more of an arm’s distance in order to protect more moderate members, which I understood,” she told the Washington Post. “But the persistent singling out … it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful … the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”
