The time was that the Democrat-favoring media liked to make fun of Republican politicians such as former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, and then-Vice President Dan Quayle, overtly insinuating that the two were not of sufficient intellectual capability to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. In both cases, however, the jokes told about Palin and Quayle were dishonest. With Palin, they took her quite accurate remark that one could see Russia from places in western Alaska, and ridiculed her that she had instead said she could see Russia from her kitchen window. Quayle had not even said anything to be distorted — they just made up the joke that he had said he wished he had studied Latin in school, since he was going to visit Latin America.
But with the soon-to-be U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), she actually said what she is now being quoted as saying. In fact, she went to YouTube Sunday and made a video with the radical leftist group Justice Democrats urging her fellow socialists (she is a member of the Democratic Socialists for America) and radicals to begin working now for the 2020 election contests.
In the video (below), Ocasio-Cortez said that electoral success will not come easily, but we need to “make sure we take back all three chambers of Congress — rather all three chambers of government: the presidency, the Senate and the House in 2020, we can’t start working in 2020.”
It reminds one of former Vice President Joe Biden’s silly remark that after the stock market crashed in 1929, President Franklin Roosevelt “went on TV” to talk about it. How many incorrect facts can one cram into one sentence? Of course, when the stock market crashed in ’29, Roosevelt was not president, and he certainly did not go on television that night to talk about it, because TV was not even commercially available for another decade.
Ocasio-Cortez is soon to be a member of Congress, and yet she does not demonstrate even a minimum of knowledge of the constitutional structure put into place by the Framers of the Constitution. Note that she began to say “three chambers of Congress,” then corrected herself. Anyone can misspeak, of course, but her supposed correction indicated that she really does not know what the three branches of government are: the legislative (Congress), the executive (led by the president), and the judicial (the federal courts).
Instead she calls them “chambers,” and one could say, well, she meant “branches.” But she still does not get it right. The three branches — not chambers — of government are not the presidency, the Senate, and the House.
Ohio Representative Niraj Antani (R-Ohio) went on Twitter to ridicule her ignorance. “What is a chamber of government?”
Rather than own up to her mistake, Ocasio-Cortez attempted to redirect the issue to political issues. “Maybe instead of Republicans drooling over every minute of footage of me in slow-mo, waiting to chop up word slips that I correct in real-time, they actually step up enough to make the argument they want to make: that they don’t believe people deserve a right to healthcare.”
Exactly what her ignorance had to do with healthcare is not clear, but it was a typical liberal diversionary tactic when confronted with a problem.
Of course, Ocasio-Cortez did not correct in “real-time.” After saying “three chambers of Congress,” she divided those three “chambers” as the House, the Senate, and the president. She still left out the judicial branch (or “chamber” in her own words). She never corrected the word “chamber” to “branch.”
Representative Antani responded, “I was elected at age 23, and I know what the three branches of government are, and that there are two chambers in Congress. Do you even know that? Not sure how you work on any issue without that basic knowledge.”
Ocasio-Cortez can not properly identify the proper name of the three basic divisions of the federal government as “branches,” rather than “chambers,” and she did not even mention the judicial branch. She either cannot explain why we have three branches of government, or perhaps she does not care why we have three branches. After all, James Madison and the other Founding Fathers purposely divided the federal government into three branches, in what is termed “separation of powers,” because they wanted to limit the power of government. For leftists such as Ocasio-Cortez, limiting the role of government in our lives is not a goal to respect (as long as they control the reins of government). As an example, she recently expressed puzzlement that people keep asking her how the country can afford socialized medicine (or, as she calls it, Medicare for All). Her answer was, “You just pay for it,” arguing that socialized medicine would be cheaper.
Exactly which “chamber” of government would take care of that, we are not sure. But don’t expect her to be ridiculed by her buddies in the media.
Image of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Screenshot of Ocasio 2018