WASHINGTON — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Republicans for labeling everything they don’t like in her Green New Deal “socialism” at a congressional hearing Tuesday.
“While I am incredibly flattered that the ranking member and many members across the aisle seem to be so enamored with a non-binding resolution presented by a freshman congresswoman sworn in three months ago, I think that ironically — despite that fixation — it doesn’t seem that they’ve actually read the contents of the proposed and presented resolution,” Ocasio-Cortez said at an oversight committee hearing on climate change.
“I would encourage that we don’t need CliffsNotes for a 14-page resolution that was designed to be read in plain English by the American people,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez was supposed to be questioning former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator who served under Democratic President Barack Obama, and former Secretary of State John Kerry, a longtime Democratic senator who was the party’s 2004 nominee for president of the United States.
But she used a chunk of her time to question Republicans’ motives.
“I would also like to highlight that it is not responsible to complain about anything that we dislike as quote-unquote socialism,” the New York Democrat said.
Ocasio-Cortez then leveled one final question at Kerry, asking him if historically a threat as large as climate change “had been met with a war-time level scale of government mobilization.”
Kerry said yes.
“And we’ve done it with remarkable consequence for the planet,” he answered. “And I believe we can and I hope we will, we have time over the course of the next years, to make thoughtful judgments about energy policy, which is the solution to climate change.”