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Ocasio-Cortez Rips GOP for Rushing Ahead With Medicaid Cuts 'When Everyone Is Asleep'
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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She's consistently voted against of sending weapons to Israel, she attempted to block the sale of arms to Israel before October 7th, and she's called what's happening in Gaza a genocide on the House floor. I can count on one hand the number of House/Senate Democrats that have a record like that. She signed on to a mostly symbolic resolution rather than give her enemies ammunition by voting against, "Condemning the global rise of antisemitism and calling upon countries and international bodies to counter antisemitism." I get not liking the IHRA definition of antisemitism, but please, get some fucking perspective.
From what I read, she diverged from the rest of the Progressives in voting for the resolution so clearly the rest of the Democrat left didn't share her worry about giving their enemies ammunition
Could she not have abstained? Also why would this be any more damaging for her than for the other ones or than her previous votes?
If indeed she is the only hope of the left-of-center in America (which would explain why some here respondent to my posts by talking about the "need to vote for the lesser evil") I really hope this was a mistake or had a concrete gain for at least her constituents rather than a start of "becoming pragmatic" - I've seen the whole descent into "pragmatism" with Labour MPs in the the UK and it invariably turned out to be them selling out for personal political gains rather than a hard-nosed weighing of pros and cons and deciding to do something they heavily disliked for the sake of a genuine greater gain for their constituents (not the "what's good for me politically is good for everybody" self-serving open-ended excuse) further down.
Lets hope I'm totally wrong and she's at the very least deriving concrete gains for her constituents for that (rather than merely political horse trading for her own gain) or just made an honest mistake.
Well, first of all:
Three members of the squad voted against it. Two of them are Muslim women from districts with large Muslim populations. The third lost her primary after AIPAC targeted her for criticizing Israel.
As for the rest of your comment, if you wanted to know why she voted for it, you could look it up. She commented on it at the time. She said it was a non-binding resolution, it didn't directly use the problematic IHRA definition, but only references a State Department guideline that passively mentions the IHRA definition, and that if it had directly used IHRA language she would have voted against it. I'll be honest, though, you don't seem like you want your questions answered, you seem like you want to complain.
Well, for starters you're one of the first whose response wasn't merely insults or vague political hand-waving slogans like "compromise", so thank you for that.
From what you wrote it does not seem as bad as I though it was.
Personally I see supporting any kind of associating Jewishness with Israel as likely politically defining, but even I have to admit that like is so many levels of indirection beyond the actual resolution that it hits an grey area, even in such a subject were the gray area has been squeezed to a very, very narrow band.
I still think she should have abstained rather than voted in favor, though my alarm about the possibility of her true nature being something else than what she portrays has significantly subsided with your explanation.
As a side note:
I am not American, and I have been thinking really hard about "What could I do if I was one, given the deeply flawed Democracy in the US" and fighting against this kind of thing and the politicians gaining from them is it.
Specifically things like actively deploying techniques from political guerrilla propaganda against AIPAC-supported candidates and AIPAC campaigns - we're talking leaftletting exposing AIPAC's candidate's voting records or just hammering pamphlets denouncing those in poles - and actively giving your own time campaigning for the anti-AIPAC (or AIPAC-targeted) candidates in Primaries. AIPAC has money, but people have their own time and have numbers (yeah, even lefties - I've been part of political parties in two countries I lived in and only a tiny tiny fraction of all people actually help out campaigning, so motivated lefties can add up to a lot of extra campaigning for a candidate targeted by AIPAC or targeting and AIPAC supported candidate). If you will, grassroots campaigning but at a level more likely to succeed than what Bernie Sanders tried against Hilary Clinton in the Democrat Presidential Primaries.
Such approach also means that the likes of AOC need not fear the effects of being targeted by AIPAC and hence has no need to "compromise" for the sake of keeping representing her constituents.
As I see it the only way that might pivot American politics from its Ever More Rightwing path in a grassroots effort at the basis of the Democrat Party (the Republicans are well beyond salvation, plus their supporters aren't really the thinking kind) that changes it enough at lower and then higher and higher levels that the next Presidential Primary featuring somebody like Bernie Sanders doesn't get torpedoed by a thoroughly corrupt DNC.
Yeah, there have been a lot of attacks targeting AOC by faux-leftists accounts trying to sew discord. I'm not saying that's you, but the discourse around H.R. 1449 was definitely part of that, so I definitely think you were exposed to some asroturfing on that, even if it was indirectly. In most ways, she has a stronger record on Palestinian rights than Bernie, who was slower to condemn Israel than many other progressives, and (to my knowledge) still hasn't used the word, "genocide," to describe what's happening in Gaza. He's still better than the vast majority of Democrats, but AOC has been an even stronger voice, and the attempt to smear her over one symbolic vote definitely seems like it was started by bad actors.
The problem with AIPAC isn't just that it's a powerful lobby, but that it's one of several anti-progressive groups that the left has to contend with in Democratic primaries. Big tech companies (especially Alphabet) are huge spenders, as well as health insurance and big pharma, just to name a few. Fighting all the 150+ AIPAC- funded Democrats s would take a lot of time and energy, and probably won't resonate as much with the average voter as something like health care would. I think the best strategy is to find the most vulnerable centrists and hammer them on all fronts. You'd probably have a better chance ousting someone like John Fetterman by pointing out that he's taken money from the Pro-Israel lobby, Wall Street, the health care industry, and Google rather than fighting 17 Senate Democrats at once over AIPAC money.
The most important thing, though, is to defend progressives who are under attack from AIPAC. The next time someone like Cori Bush is targeted by AIPAC, people need to fund her, volunteer for her, and most importantly, refuse to allow the Israel lobby to equate condemning a genocide with antisemitism.