The woman who ousted 10-term incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in Tuesday’s Democratic primary in New York said Democratic lawmakers shouldn’t be afraid to “play hardball” and “delay the damage” of another right-leaning Supreme Court pick.
“I think the [Democrats] should be unafraid to play hardball a little bit in this Congress,” Democratic Socialist candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN Thursday. “After all the Republicans have shown throughout the Obama presidency the extent in which they would go to be obstructionists.”
New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Democrats “should be unafraid to play hardball” over the new Supreme Court pick, saying Republicans “stole the first Supreme Court seat” pic.twitter.com/jLta0u2Gtd
— New Day (@NewDay) June 28, 2018
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who served on the Supreme Court for 30 years, announced his retirement Wednesday, which will take effect July 31. This gives President Trump the opportunity to select the second Supreme Court Justice of his presidency.
“While I don’t believe that we should be halting progress in this country, at the same time they [Republicans] stole the first Supreme Court seat,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And for us to take that sitting down in this time, especially when there are so many critical decisions … at the very least that we can do is delay that damage.”
After Kennedy announced his retirement, multiple Democrats said they would try to block Trump’s pick until after the 2018 midterm elections, claiming they were doing the same thing Republicans did when Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly near the end of former President Barack Obama’s term and Republicans refused to hold hearings until after the election.
Trump’s first Supreme Court pick was Justice Neil Gorsuch, widely regarded as the biggest success of the Trump presidency thus far.
