“This [Congressional] term, there are legitimate white supremacist sympathizers that sit at the heart and at the core of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives,” Ocasio-Cortez declared. “When you see someone like the House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy of the Republican party respond to white supremacists vitriol coming from his own members, not with censure like they did with Representative Steve King of Iowa, not with, you know, being stripped of committees, not with any consequence, you have to wonder where — who actually has that power. And it increasingly seems, unfortunately, that in the House Republican caucus, Kevin McCarthy answers to these QAnon members of Congress, not the other way around. and that is something that frankly needs to be said.”
“He said he was going to pull Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) aside after, you know, her comments to Parkland activists and comments saying that Muslim-Americans should not fully and freely serve in the House, that they must be forced to swear on a Bible, et cetera,” she said. “But I’ve seen Kevin McCarthy pull someone aside before for a talking to. And that representative that I last saw him do that to was Representative Ted Yoho of Florida. And what Kevin McCarthy did was that he pulled him aside to essentially excuse his behavior, to allow it, and to abet it. And actually, Kevin McCarthy’s lack of holding his own caucus accountable is one major reason why I went to the floor last year to hold Yoho accountable myself.”
“So when I hear that Representative McCarthy is going to pull a member aside who has made white supremacist sympathizing comments, the thing that I think is, what is he going to tell them? Keep it up?” Ocasio-Cortez asked. “Because there are no consequences in the Republican caucus for violence. There’s no consequence for racism. no consequence for misogyny. No consequence for insurrection. And no consequences means that they condone it.”
“It means that that silence is acceptance, and they want it because they know that it is a core animating political energy for them,” she said. “And this is extremely dangerous, an extremely dangerous threshold we have crossed because we are now away from acting out of fealty to their president that they had in the Oval Office, and now we are talking about fealty to white supremacist organizations as a political tool. And for, you know, Republicans that are in that caucus that are unwilling to hold that accountable or to distance themselves from it, we really, really need to ask ourselves what they are evolving into. Because this is no longer about a party of limited government. This is about something much more nefarious.”
