Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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      Campaigning AOC electrifies crowds as Democrats fear brutal midterms

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      Campaigning AOC electrifies crowds as Democrats fear brutal midterms Congresswoman has been a boon to progressive candidates in Texas while party grapples with rift in WashingtonHolding a gold microphone and wearing a seafoam-green pantsuit, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez energized the San Antonio crowd with her vision for flipping the state of Texas to Democratic control.“It will happen,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a rally earlier this month. “The only question is when, Texas.”As the crowd cheered, she added: “The work that you put in today, the work that you put in tomorrow, the work that you put in on Monday – when you go one more door when you’re tired, when you make one more call when you feel exhausted, you’re bringing that day one day sooner.”The progressives in the audience roared in response, hanging on to her every word.“Texas will turn blue,” @AOC says to the crowd as they cheer her on. “It’s inevitable!” pic.twitter.com/YZBJHCbx1n— Priscilla Aguirre (@CillaAguirre) February 12, 2022
      Four years after bursting on to the national political stage with a shocking primary victory over a long-serving House Democrat, Ocasio-Cortez is using her substantial political influence to promote progressive candidates and policies. Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign in 2018 was largely dismissed as a pipe dream, but the leftwing New York congresswoman is now impossible to ignore.Just this month, the New Yorker interviewed Ocasio-Cortez about the fight for voting rights and her role as a progressive icon, while the editors of New York magazine are releasing a book documenting her rapid rise in Democratic politics. As she makes headlines, Ocasio-Cortez has continued to use her massive social media following and her significant campaign war chest to advance her leftist policy agenda.AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colourRead moreWith Democrats bracing for a potentially disastrous midterm season, the congresswoman’s actions on the campaign trail and on Capitol Hill make it clear that she will continue to be a dominant force for the progressive movement. There seems to be no question now: AOC is here to stay.On the trailOcasio-Cortez travelled to Texas this month to campaign for two of the progressive candidates she has endorsed this election cycle, Jessica Cisneros and Greg Casar. Since her first victory in 2018, Ocasio-Cortez has used her celebrity status to help other progressives attract voters and raise money, which she has a unique talent for. During the 2020 cycle, her campaign committee raised more than $20m.“Having her there on stage with you, it just is an amazing experience,” said James Thompson, a former congressional candidate who held a 2018 rally with Ocasio-Cortez in Wichita, Kansas. “The immediate impact on my campaign was fundraising. We raised a substantial amount of money off of the rally that we had here. It really energized the people.”An endorsement from Ocasio-Cortez has the ability to immediately elevate a progressive candidate’s campaign, and the congresswoman does not limit herself to open-seat races. In the four years since she won her own primary against the then congressman Joe Crowley, Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed a number of candidates who are challenging sitting lawmakers. Cisneros, for example, is attempting to defeat Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who has served in the House since 2005.“AOC endorses more primary challengers to incumbents than pretty much anyone who is a current incumbent in Congress,” said Waleed Shahid, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, which backed Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign. “I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that she was the primary challenger to an incumbent, so she knows personally how difficult it is to get support for something that requires that level of courage.”But Ocasio-Cortez’s willingness to openly oppose Democratic incumbents has rankled some of her House colleagues who have been on the receiving end of her criticism.“This election is taking place in the 28th congressional District of Texas – not New York City,” Cuellar’s campaign said in a statement ahead of Ocasio-Cortez’s rallies in San Antonio and Austin. “The voters will decide this election, not far-left celebrities who stand for defunding the police, open borders, eliminating oil & gas jobs, and raising taxes on hard working Texans. Members should take care of their own district before taking failed ideas to South Texas.”Ocasio-Cortez’s rallies in Texas also displayed her singular ability to enrage her Republican critics, who swiftly denounced her suggestion that the traditionally conservative state would inevitably move to the left.“If AOC thinks for a moment that Texans will fall for her whacked-out, woke, socialist idiocy, she doesn’t know Texas,” said Dan Patrick, the state’s lieutenant governor. But to Ocasio-Cortez’s many admirers, her frequent clashes with Democrats and Republicans alike have set an example for a new kind of politics.“She’s been an inspiration, I think, to a lot of people,” Thompson said. “Now, I think that scares the hell out of the Democratic party though, too, because we’re bucking the establishment and saying, ‘Look, we want you to represent the people, not just party interest.’”In the halls of CongressOcasio-Cortez’s willingness to clash with members of her party extends beyond the campaign trail to her work in Congress.Earlier this month, she pursued the bold strategy of trying to force a vote on a bill to ban members of Congress from trading stocks. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, had voiced opposition to the proposed ban, and Ocasio-Cortez’s tactics seemed aimed at forcing the hand of Democratic leadership. (Pelosi has since struck a more open-minded tone about the ban on members’ stock-trading.)Ocasio-Cortez has also been unafraid to criticize some of her centrist colleagues who have attacked progressive policy proposals. On Friday, after Axios published a report suggesting moderate Democrats blamed the party’s falling polling numbers on progressives and their support for the “defund the police” movement, Ocasio-Cortez hit back over Twitter.She argued the real reason behind Democrats’ bleak prospects in the midterm elections was the party’s failure to pass the Build Back Better Act, the $1.75tn spending package at the heart of Joe Biden’s economic agenda. Ocasio-Cortez accused her centrist colleagues of tanking the legislation by allowing the bipartisan infrastructure bill to pass on its own, leaving Democrats with nothing to campaign on.“They don’t know how to accept responsibility so are lazily blaming the same folks they always do,” Ocasio-Cortez said.Rahna Epting, the executive director of the progressive group MoveOn, similarly dismissed claims that Ocasio-Cortez and her allies are dragging down Democrats’ electoral prospects as “utter nonsense”.“Members of Congress of the progressive flank have raised expectations on Democrats broadly to deliver and prioritize people over profits. There is nothing wrong with that,” Epting said. “What Democrats need to do is to stop the infighting.”Epting, whose group was one of the only progressive organizations to endorse Ocasio-Cortez during her 2018 primary battle, praised the congresswoman for using her platform to advocate for important issues including student debt relief and the climate crisis.“AOC’s superpower is to expose and shed light on corruption and injustices that have been longstanding,” Epting said. “I think she has been one of the most electrifying members of Congress, probably in the history of the United States. And she’s a true champion for people.”But Ocasio-Cortez will be the first to admit that her hopes of enacting meaningful progressive policies have suffered setbacks in recent months. Build Back Better remains stalled in the Senate because of Democrat Joe Manchin’s opposition, and the party has failed to enact national voting rights legislation.Instead of bemoaning congressional inaction, though, Ocasio-Cortez has urged patience.“We have a culture of immediate gratification where if you do something and it doesn’t pay off right away, we think it’s pointless,” she told the New Yorker. “There is no movement, there is no effort, there is no unionizing, there is no fight for the vote, there is no resistance to draconian abortion laws, if people think that the future is baked in and nothing is possible and that we’re doomed.”Thompson has seen the long-term impact of Ocasio-Cortez’s work for himself. He lost his 2018 race, but since then, the politics of Wichita have shifted. Democrats now make up a majority of the Wichita city council, when they previously only held one of seven seats.“Even though I didn’t win, her coming really energized our local Democrats in our community,” Thompson said. “It made us realize that look, we’re not alone. And we can do something when we come together.”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezDemocratsUS politicsUS CongressfeaturesReuse this content More

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      AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colour

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      AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colour‘You’re a creep, bro,’ says New York congresswoman after Carlson attacked Ocasio-Cortez in Fox News segment The Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday night, claiming the US congresswoman was not a woman of colour.“She’s a rich entitled white lady,” he said.In return, the New York Democrat, popularly known as AOC, said: “This is the type of stuff you say when your name starts with a P and ends with dejo.”Dictionary.com defines pendejo as “a mildly vulgar insult for ‘asshole’ or ‘idiot’ in Spanish”.It’s Trump’s time to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth | Lloyd GreenRead more“Once again,” Ocasio-Cortez added, “the existence of a wife or daughters doesn’t make a man good. And this one is basura.”Basura is Spanish for “trash”.She also accused Carlson of sexual harassment.Ocasio-Cortez’s mother is from Puerto Rico, her father from the Bronx. She has described herself as a woman of colour.Carlson said: “No one ever dares to challenge that description, but every honest person knows it is hilariously absurd.“There is no place on Earth outside of American colleges and newsrooms where Sandy Cortez” – Carlson’s derisory nickname for the New York congresswoman – “would be recognized as a quote, woman of color, because she’s not!“She’s a rich entitled white lady. She’s the pampered obnoxious ski bunny in the matching snowsuit who tells you to pull up your mask while you’re standing in the lift line at Jackson Hole. They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter what shade they are.”The leading provocateur in Fox News’ evening line-up was discussing a book about Ocasio-Cortez, Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC, written by Lisa Miller, a reporter at New York magazine.Carlson said Miller’s book was “like a box of Fig Newtons. You know it’s wrong to open it, but the temptation is strong, and so we did.”As the media watchdog Mediate put it, several of the passages Carlson read were “fawning in nature and weave mundane videos AOC has posted online – such as her assembling Ikea furniture – into a grand narrative about her life”.In one passage, Carlson said, the congresswoman is described as “pointedly” saying into a camera, “I’m alone today”.“Is it just us or does that sound like an invitation to a booty call?” Carlson said.“Maybe one step from ‘What are you wearing?’ Either way it’s a little strange. It’s definitely over-sharing and yet, according to the book, over-sharing is the key to Sandy Cortez’s success.”Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Remember when the right wing had a meltdown when I suggested they exhibit obsessive impulses around young women? Well now Tucker Carlson is wishing for … this on national TV.“You’re a creep, bro. If you’re this easy with sexual harassment on air, how are you treating your staff?”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezFox NewsRaceUS politicsDemocratsNew YorkPuerto RiconewsReuse this content More

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      Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Very real risk’ US democracy won’t exist in 10 years

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      Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Very real risk’ US democracy won’t exist in 10 years Efforts by Republicans to restrict voting rights could result in return to Jim Crow era, says progressive in New Yorker interview The progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes the Republican-led pressure on political systems is so great that there is “a very real risk” democracy will cease to exist in the US within a decade.The leftist Democratic politician derided efforts by Republican legislatures around the country to restrict voting rights as the “opening salvos” in a war on democracy, which she said could result in a return to the Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement of racial minorities.In the interview with the New Yorker, she warned that the clock was ticking for Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders to do anything about it, with huge chunks of the president’s agenda, including legislation to protect voting rights, stalled in Congress by more conservative or moderate members of her own party.“Honestly, it is a shitshow,” Ocasio-Cortez said of working in the same Democratic-controlled Congress in which centrist senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have blocked both electoral reforms and Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better social spending initiative.“We don’t have much time,” she said. “The president has not been using his executive power to the extent that some would say is necessary.”The issue of voting rights was a dominant theme of the interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, who asked her about her previous use of the phrase “if we have a democracy 10 years from now”.“There’s a very real risk that we will not,” she said. “What we risk is having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to pretend that it is, but isn’t.“We’ve already seen the opening salvos of this, where you have a very targeted, specific attack on the right to vote across the United States, particularly in areas where Republican power is threatened by changing electorates and demographics.“You have white nationalist, reactionary politics starting to grow into a critical mass … the continued sophisticated takeover of our democratic systems in order to turn them into undemocratic systems, all in order to overturn results that a party in power may not like.”Although she believes the situation “is not beyond hope”, Ocasio-Cortez fears inaction will lead to a “return to Jim Crow”, a reference to repressive laws in the US south to the mid-20th century designed to enforce racial segregation and disenfranchise Blacks.“You have it already happening in Texas, where Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement laws have already been proposed,” she said.“You have the complete erasure and attack on our own understanding of history, to replace teaching history with institutionalized propaganda from white nationalist perspectives in our schools. This is what the scaffolding of Jim Crow was.“The question we’re really facing is, was the last 50 to 60 years after the Civil Rights Act just a mere flirtation that the United States had with a multiracial democracy that we will then decide was inconvenient for those in power? And we will revert to what we had before?”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Florida man pleads guilty to threatening to kill Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi

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      Florida man pleads guilty to threatening to kill Ocasio-Cortez and PelosiPaul Vernon Hoeffer, 60, also pleads guilty in federal court to threats against Kim Foxx, a prominent district attorney in Illinois A Florida man has pleaded guilty to threatening to kill Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi, two leading Democrats in Congress, and Kim Foxx, a prominent district attorney in Illinois.‘The walls are closing in’: Trump reels from week of political setbacksRead moreThe US attorney’s office for the southern district of Florida said Paul Vernon Hoeffer, 60, entered his plea in federal court in Fort Pierce on Friday.Hoeffer admitted calling Pelosi’s Washington office in March 2019, threatening “to come a ‘long, long, way’ to rattle her head with bullets and cut her head off”.He admitted a call to Foxx on the same day, saying bullets would “rattle her brain”.In November 2020, Hoeffer called the office of Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive from New York. This time, the DoJ said, Hoeffer “threatened that he would ‘rip her head off’, and told her to sleep with one eye open”.Citing the plea agreement, NBC News reported that Hoeffer also “warned of ‘all-out war’ and a ‘civilian army’” and made racist remarks in his call to Foxx.Hoeffer made his calls before the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 2021, in which supporters of Donald Trump sought to overturn his election defeat.Some looked for lawmakers to capture or kill. One rioter, from Texas, faces charges including a threat to “assassinate” Ocasio-Cortez. His case has yet to be tried.Capitol police have reported an increase in threats against lawmakers. NBC cited the chief of Capitol police, J Thomas Manger, as saying there were around 9,600 threats in 2021, up from more than 8,000 in 2020.As prominent Democratic women, Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi are common targets for threats, from within the walls of Congress as well as without.Ocasio-Cortez was elected in 2018, as Democrats took the House in opposition to Trump. She quickly became a national star. In 2019, Time magazine began a profile by describing nerves in her Washington office.US man charged with threatening to ‘assassinate’ Alexandria Ocasio-CortezRead more“Every 10 minutes or so,” the magazine said, “someone knocks on the big wooden door of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office on Capitol Hill. The noise makes staffers stiffen.“It’s almost always a harmless fan, one of dozens who arrive each day, leaving neon-colored Post-it notes as devotional offerings.“But in her first three months in Congress, aides say, enough people have threatened to murder Ocasio-Cortez that Capitol police trained her staff to perform risk assessments of her visitors.”This, the magazine said, was “the daily reality for America’s newest human Rorschach test. Wonder Woman of the left, Wicked Witch of the right”.At sentencing in April, Hoeffer will face up to 15 years in prison.TopicsDemocratsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezNancy PelosiUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announces positive Covid test

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announces positive Covid testProgressive congresswoman ‘experiencing symptoms’Office says political star had booster vaccine shot last year The Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has tested positive for Covid-19.Biden health chief endures Fox News grilling over mixed Covid messagingRead moreIn a statement on Sunday evening, the office of the New York progressive said she was “experiencing symptoms and recovering at home.“The congresswoman received her booster shot this fall and encourages everyone to get their booster and follow all Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance”.New York is experiencing a huge surge of Covid cases linked to the Omicron variant, placing strain on hospitals and public health resources.The city has posted high rates of vaccination.Earlier, in an interview on Fox News Sunday, the director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, was asked about the severity of the Omicron variant compared to the Delta variant.Walensky said: “We are starting to see data from other countries that indicate on a person-by-person basis it may not be. However, given the volume of cases that we’re seeing with Omicron we very well may see death rates rise dramatically.”According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 837,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the US. Around two-thirds of the eligible population is considered fully vaccinated but resistance to public health measures stoked by conservative politicians and media has dogged the federal response.Walensky also emphasised the importance of vaccination and booster shots, saying: “We have seen with the Omicron variant that prior infection protects you less well than it had … with prior variants.“Right now, I think the most important thing to do is to protect Americans. We do that by getting them vaccinated and getting them boosted.”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezCoronavirusNew YorkUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      AOC speaks out against Republicans’ gun-wielding Christmas photos

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      AOC speaks out against Republicans’ gun-wielding Christmas photosAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls out Lauren Boebert on Twitter for posting a picture of her family holding rifles in front of a tree Leftwing congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has spoken out about the hypocrisy of gun-wielding Christmas card photos, an emerging trend among several Republic lawmakers who have posted holiday photos showing themselves and their family holding military-style rifles.Man charged with arson for burning down Fox News Christmas treeRead moreIn a tweet on Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez called out far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who had posted a picture of her family, including her small children, holding rifles in front of a Christmas tree.“Tell me again where Christ said ‘use the commemoration of my birth to flex violent weapons for personal political gain’?” said Ocasio-Cortez, recalling back in 2015 when conservatives declared that there was a “war on Christmas”, with companies like Starbucks facing threats of boycott.“lol @ all the years Republicans spent on cultural hysteria of society ‘erasing Christmas and it’s meaning’ when they’re doing that fine all on their own.”Tell me again where Christ said “use the commemoration of my birth to flex violent weapons for personal political gain”?lol @ all the years Republicans spent on cultural hysteria of society “erasing Christmas and it’s meaning” when they’re doing that fine all on their own https://t.co/TOKE1SmY4C— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 8, 2021
      In addition to Boebert’s gun-themed Christmas photo, Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie recently posted a picture of his family holding rifles while posing in front of a Christmas tree, with the caption: “Merry Christmas! PS: Santa, please bring ammo.”The photo was posted only days after a school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, located an hour outside of the state’s capitol, where four students died and seven people were injured.Boebert and Massie’s Christmas photos faced widespread criticism, as several other Republicans have used violent imagery in attempts to shock and provoke as well as rally supporters. Arizona congressman Adam Gosar was censured after tweeting an animated video depicting him killing Ocasio-Cortez and Boebert received criticism for Islamaphobic comments about Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar.“Here his family’s got guns under a Christmas tree just after four kids were killed,” said Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Clinton administration, in an interview with the Guardian. “The guy’s abominable but that’s what’s happening to the Republican party. They’re flat-out nuts. There’s a piece of the Republican party that now supports violence.”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘A core threat to our democracy’: threat of political violence growing across US

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      ‘A core threat to our democracy’: threat of political violence growing across USRepublicans’ muted response to Paul Gosar’s behavior has intensified fears about where incendiary rhetoric may lead Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood on the House floor and implored her colleagues to hold Paul Gosar accountable for sharing an altered anime video showing him killing her and attacking Joe Biden.“Our work here matters. Our example matters. There is meaning in our service,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her speech last week. “And as leaders in this country, when we incite violence with depictions against our colleagues, that trickles down into violence in this country.”House Republicans heard Ocasio-Cortez’s impassioned plea and responded with a collective shrug. All but three Republican members voted against censuring Gosar and stripping him of his committee assignments, while every House Democrat supported the resolution.The Gosar incident served as the latest data point in an alarming trend in American politics. In a year that began with a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, lawmakers have seen a sharp rise in the number of threats against them. Republicans’ muted response to Gosar’s behavior has intensified fears about the possibility of more political violence in America in the months to come.Jackie Speier, the Democratic congresswoman who spearheaded the effort to censure Gosar, warned that Republicans’ refusal to hold him accountable could have dangerous repercussions.“If you are silent about a member of Congress wanting to murder another member of Congress, even in a ‘cartoon’, you are inciting violence,” Speier told the Guardian. “And if you incite violence, it begets violence.”That cycle is already playing out in the halls of Congress. The US Capitol police reported earlier this year that the agency had seen a 107% increase in threats against members compared with 2020. The USCP chief, Tom Manger, has said he expects the total number of threats against members to surpass 9,000 this year, compared with 3,939 such threats in 2017.Some of those threats have been on vivid display in the past month. In addition to Gosar’s violent video, the 13 House Republicans who voted in support of the bipartisan infrastructure bill earlier month have received threatening messages.Representative Fred Upton of Michigan publicly shared one such message, in which a man called the Republican congressman a “fucking piece of shit traitor”. “I hope you die. I hope everybody in your fucking family dies,” the man said in the message.And those kinds of threats are not reserved solely for members of Congress. Election workers and school board members also say they are receiving more violent messages. According to an April survey commissioned by the Brennan Center for Justice, nearly one in three election officials are concerned about their safety while on the job.Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel at the government watchdog group Common Cause, described such violent tactics as “a core threat to our democracy”.“The threat of violence is really to intimidate people from doing their jobs and upholding their oath of office,” Spaulding said. “When you start having these violent episodes enter the system, it is totally counter to the way that we are supposed to engage in open and fair debate about policy issues in this country.”There are already signs that fears over personal safety are pushing lawmakers out of office. When the Republican congressman Anthony Gonzalez announced in September that he would not seek re-election, he said his vote to impeach Donald Trump for inciting the insurrection had affected the lives of his family members.Gonzalez told the New York Times that, at one point earlier this year, uniformed police officers had to escort him and his family through the Cleveland airport because of security concerns.“That’s one of those moments where you say, ‘Is this really what I want for my family when they travel, to have my wife and kids escorted through the airport?’” Gonzalez said.Even though threats are affecting their own caucus members, House Republicans rejected the opportunity to send a message by voting to censure Gosar. Instead, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, attacked the censure resolution as a Democratic “abuse of power” and suggested he would award Gosar with “better committee assignments” whenever Republicans regain control of the chamber.“He’s got a number of radical extremists in his caucus that are very effective communicators to the right fringe, and he can’t really rein them in because reining them in means they will attack him,” Speier said. “You might as well put a brass ring in Kevin McCarthy’s nose because they’re pulling him around.”Dr Joanne Freeman, a Yale history professor and author of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, warned that McCarthy’s response to Gosar’s behavior may encourage similar incidents in the future.After all, there are other historical examples of lawmakers being rewarded for violent behavior, Freeman noted. After Congressman Preston Brooks attacked Senator Charles Sumner with a cane over his anti-slavery views in 1856, he resigned from the House but was then quickly re-elected by South Carolina voters.“He’s going to be rewarded for it in some ways, and because of that, there will be others that follow in that model,” Freeman said. “It’s a moment that shows how far party is above government and above institutions of government and above institutional stability.”While acknowledging the possibility of future violence within Congress, Freeman added that the Gosar incident could also provide an opportunity for a course correction in political discourse.“We’re in a moment of extreme contingency, and indeed things might become much worse,” Freeman said. “But during that kind of moment of extreme contingency where anything can happen, those are also moments where it’s possible to make positive change.”For Speier, Gosar’s behavior served as a reminder of how far some of her colleagues have strayed from their duties to constituents. The California congresswoman, who announced her retirement last week, urged fellow members to focus on advancing policy rather than spewing violent rhetoric to raise money and rack up retweets.“I love this institution. It’s such a privilege to serve,” Speier said. “We’re given the opportunity to fashion legislation to make lives better for the American people. And that’s what we should be doing.”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezRepublicansUS CongressUS politicsnewsReuse this content More