Game on. The battle between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) with her progressive “squad” went full tilt over the weekend.
Now, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) has tweeted she’s “sorry not sorry” that Pelosi is “salty” about “WHO is wielding the power to shift” public sentiment and the future of the Democratic Party.
Omar leaped into the fray Sunday in a tweet to Ocasio-Cortez, in which Omar called her colleague “sis.”
Omar was responding to Ocasio Cortez’s clapback to a dig by Pelosi in a column Saturday by New York Times writer Maureen Dowd. Pelosi dismissed the women — along with freshmen Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — as a tiny squad with no real support in Congress.
“All these people have [is] their public whatever and their Twitter world,” Pelosi said.
Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response: “That public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment. And wielding the power to shift it is how we actually achieve meaningful change in this country.”
The latest tensions between Pelosi and the freshmen Democrats erupted Friday when a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez was quoted in a Washington Post op-ed saying that the “greatest threat to mankind is the cowardice of the Democratic Party.”
The new source of friction was the clash over Pelosi’s decision to back the Senate border funding bill — instead of the House version — even though it lacked guarantees for humanitarian aid for detained immigrants, particularly children.
Pelosi told Dowd it was the strongest bill she could get, and indicated that the upstart Democrats needed to be realistic.
Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti also joined the action, calling Pelosi’s attacks on her young Democratic colleagues “baffling.” He said Pelosi is “just mad that she got outmaneuvered (again) by Republicans” on the border bill.
Chakrabarti also wondered what is so occupying Pelosi’s time that she can’t launch impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. “What is this legislative mastermind doing?” he asked.
There’s been no response yet from Pelosi to Omar or Chakrabarti. The speaker did, however, invite the U.S. Women’s National Team to the Capitol to celebrate the players’ “inspiring” World Cup victory.
Ocasio-Cortez was the first to extend an invitation last month to team co-captain Megan Rapinoe after the star midfielder said there was no way she’d accept an invitation to the “fucking White House.” As for a House tour, Rapinoe responded to Ocasio-Cortez: “Consider it done!”