House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she couldn’t be prouder of freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The California Democrat praised Ocasio-Cortez after she delivered an impassioned speech on the House floor Thursday night about the prevalence of sexism in Congress following her confrontation with Republican Rep. Ted Yoho.
“What was clear from what she said is that what happened that day was his problem and continues to be his problem,” Pelosi said Friday on Andrea Mitchell Reports.” She’s not taking any insult from him in terms of any diminishment of competence that she has as to who she is. We couldn’t have been prouder.”
The Hill first reported that Yoho accosted Ocasio-Cortez with insults on the steps of the U.S. Capitol after she suggested that crime had surged in New York City over the summer because of poverty. As the two departed, Yoho reportedly called the freshman congresswoman a “f—ing b—-.” Yoho denies that he used vulgar language to insult the congresswoman.
Yoho, a Florida congressman, spoke on the House floor on Wednesday, apologizing for how the incident was “misunderstood” by the press. After criticizing Yoho on social media for not apologizing to her, Ocasio-Cortez delivered a roughly 10-minute speech of her own on Thursday, reading the vulgar language attributed to Yoho into the Congressional Record and condemning a culture of “accepting violence and violent language against women.”
Pelosi compared the incident to President Trump’s recent tweet about how a vote for his presumptive Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, would be disastrous for suburban housewives.
“He’s just fearmongering,” Pelosi said. “It’s just a ball of his tricks that he does all the time — bigotry, fearmongering, condescension, and distortion. But you know what? American women are smarter than that. Again, the housewives part was interesting. I loved being a housewife when I was a housewife, but I was other things as well, and I had other judgment. It’s actually sort of in the same vein of Mr. Yoho … as a grandmother of two young granddaughters and as a mother of four daughters, I’m saying, ‘You go, congresswoman.’ It’s the same condescension and disrespect.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday insisted Yoho adequately apologized to Ocasio-Cortez and called for Democrats to forgive him and move on from the issue.
