Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has accused establishment Democrats of treating her “like shit” as progressive activists urged her to run for president in 2028.
In a 100-minute long video posted on Instagram, the 37-year-old congresswoman from New York said that the party had a “remarkable opportunity” to pass left-wing policies after the midterm elections. She also accused the party’s leadership of starving funds from left-wing candidates during the campaign.
“There’s this huge conversation about candidates that were under invested in,” Ocasio-Cortez said. She cited Angie Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who came within 240,000 votes of flipping Florida from red to blue, but ultimately lost to the Republican candidate Ashley Moody.
“If Angie Nixon had just had a little bit of that support, that outcome could have changed. But that money has to come from somewhere and it comes from these people,” Ocasio-Cortez said in reference to the party’s Senate leadership.
Reflecting on the period after she was first elected to Congress in 2018 at the age of 29, Ocasio-Cortez accused senior Democrats of being “horrifically cruel” to her. “I mean I was treated like shit,” she said. “Everybody took a swing at me.”
The Bronx congresswoman is seen as the likeliest progressive candidate to run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2028.
I know you self-corrected to some extent, but you should know that BOTH chambers of Congress have a majority leader, and you’re focusing on the one that doesn’t matter so much. One majority leader is almost irrelevant to anyone outside Congress, and the other majority leader is one of the most powerful figures in government.
At the top of the Senate is the Senate Majority Leader. Right now that’s Schumer. He is, at times, the most powerful individual in Congress, and can block or allow legislation from ever coming to a vote, which is how he has stifled bills that would have decreased our cash flow to the genocide in Israel. The Senate Majority Leader is selected by party caucus, and is the party leader as well as being the leader of the chamber.
At the top of the House is the Speaker of the House, which of course you know, but after him is the House majority leader. We almost never hear about them, and they are selected by party caucus but do not lead the chamber: again, in the House that’s the Speaker. Usually when the media is talking about this specific role, they call it House majority leader to differentiate it. (I just got corrected on this point myself recently, it gets confusing after a while.)
The House is different from the Senate in this way, because the Speaker of the House is selected by ALL representatives in a public vote, while the Senate Majority Leader is selected within a closed-door party caucus.
And then after them, both houses have minority leaders – party positions – as well as whips, people who do the primary work of rounding up the members of their own party when it comes time to vote. Like the House majority leader, we rarely hear about these either: by the time something is worth getting into the weeds on knowing, the actual leader – the Speaker or the Senate Majority Leader – is already in the mix and will speak for the rest.
Thus, for myself, trying to prioritize congressional roles in order to understand current events, I don’t even think about the House majority leader, because the only majority leader that has a truly powerful role is the Senate one.
And if you’re ever confused – like the rest of us – focus on the chamber, not the role. Is it referring to the Senate, or to the House? That will tell you what you need to know, if you’re coming across a name or a role that seems duplicative or unfamiliar.
I’m writing this solely because I think that’s where you might be going and want to spare you some confusion: while the role does have some power, the House majority leader is not usually noteworthy, and rarely even makes the news beyond DC insiders. Senate Majority Leader is usually the one you want to pay attention to.
Yes, I’ve been reading the comments hadn’t come out to edit / correct clarify since it’s already been capably done by my fellow lemsters.
So the Speaker of the House is basically the same as the Majority Leader in the Senate, but it’s different than being the Majority Leader in the House… perfectly sensical and absolutely normal.
Yes! You got it, lol.
The reason it’s like this is because American democracy literally started off as an experiment. You’ll even hear us referred to as “the American experiment” as in, “Will the American experiment survive?”
The first congresses, including the ones that gave us the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were making it up as they went along, and even they didn’t know what they were doing. They just did it. They knew they didn’t want what they had, so whatever they were going to do was going to be something never tried before. So they tried it.
All of this is like a 400-year-old house that has been adjusted and added on and rebuilt and renovated over time. Folks on the Magna Carta had a really good start on polishing their game over those of us on the American experiment.