Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s verbal attacks against her and other freshman liberal members of the party “outright disrespectful.”
Pelosi has spent much of the week feuding with Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, the four female members of Congress who have received the most media attention since being elected to their first terms last fall.
“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,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Washington Post on Wednesday. “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.”
In a closed-door meeting, Pelosi warned her party against tweeting about other members of the Democratic Party, according to the Post. The speaker’s admonition came days after she told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that the vocal freshmen had little real power in Congress.
“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” she said. “But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
