Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) has “been with the Republicans” since Congress returned, after the Michigan Democrat endorsed former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) in the midterms.
“She’s been with the Republicans ever since she’s come back. So she’s been on the Republican side of the aisle,” Ocasio-Cortez said during an appearance on “The Don Lemon Show” that aired Thursday.
“This is just the epitome of a certain kind of transactional politics,” she added. “And it’s really sad.”
How are they getting elected in the first place? Are they making appealing campaign promises, then reneging on them or are they just put forth as “your local DNC appointed representative - what are you going to do, vote republican instead?”?
There’s no requirement for politicians to uphold campaign promises, and no penalty to reneg, so yeah.
It’s tough because the nature of a Representative Democracy means we should empower representatives to make decisions that we ourselves wouldn’t necessarily make – much like parents stopping children from eating candy every day. They should ideally have a full-time job of educating themselves, consulting experts, figuring out what is best for their constituents.
haha. Funny. I know.
But maybe there is a middle-ground where we can not keep them so rigid to campaign promises, but permit Recall votes at any time during their terms on any elected official – even if the threshold may be higher at 60 or 70% to prevent too much knee-jerk reactivity.
There’s a lot to unpack on this but you’ve got gist.
At the root? America is just a very conservative country, and it has backwards laws on the books that only accelerates our downward spiral. It’s made more conservative because the wealth gap has widened so much and billionaires and psychopathic corporations blindly pursuing profit only care about enriching themselves – and they can now freely buy media megaphones and dupe the masses while simultaneously eroding education and making the electorate more short-sighted, easier to dupe. (Hence why Trump said, “I love the poorly educated” and “Smart people don’t like me.”
So the Overton Window drifts right; sensible policies that would be center-left by European or Canadian standards gets painted as radical communism, etc.
Democrats as I noted in another comment below are timid because they’re up against a more powerful force and partly-corrupted from within themselves. The corrupt (and naive) have sold the party on the notion that, “Hey, we can never persuade the electorate. We can never compete with the megaphones of the right, so best we can do is be Republican-Lite, lest we’re perceived as commies by the poorly educated electorate.”
So Overton Window keeps being defined by the Right, so goes the country…
That is… Unless gas prices go up lol.
Ninja Edit: I should say there are things to be hopeful for. Talarico has a damn near AOC platform and just won Texas. A Sanders-backed progressive just beat Collins in Maine finally. A Medicare For All and Muslim just won the battleground state of Michigan. So the bullshit that progressivism doesn’t sell and we have to cater to the blind is largely debunked.