Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) delivered a stinging assessment of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) after House Republicans failed this week with their baseless bid to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
“Let’s just call a spade a spade here,” Ocasio-Cortez told MSNBC’s “All In” host Chris Hayes on Wednesday.
“Republicans are dealing with not their first-choice speaker, not their second-choice speaker, not their third-choice speaker. They’re dealing with the speaker that they could get and that they could agree on,” Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, drawing laughter from Hayes.
Watch the exchange here:
“The fact that they think that Democrats owe it to Republicans to give them…our attendance counts is laughable. It really speaks to the fact that you’re working with people who are not used to being in this chamber,” says @AOC on House Republicans failing to impeach Mayorkas. pic.twitter.com/fxIXg4SYpD
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) February 8, 2024
“That means an individual that does not have experience in party leadership, that is a relative newcomer when it comes to the [caliber] of member that you’re used to seeing when they typically get the speaker’s gavel,” the lawmaker continued. It means “the experience in vote-counting is not quite up to the standard that we usually see in a speakership.”
There was also “absolutely no evidence for an impeachable offense” and the whole attempted impeachment was “completely politicized,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez later mocked conservative complaints over their narrow 214-216 defeat that the Democrats hadn’t provided them with their attendance counts as “laughable.”
“It really speaks to the fact that you’re working with people who are not used to being in this chamber,” she said.
Hayes noted how some Republicans “were mad” they hadn’t been told Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) would briefly leave the hospital, where he was undergoing abdominal surgery, to visit Congress and cast his vote against the impeachment.
“Like, you should have given them a heads-up on that,” he sarcastically suggested.
Ocasio-Cortez replied, “I mean, if you didn’t expect Al Green to be doing that, then you don’t know who Al, Reverend and Rep. Al Green is.”
Watch the full interview here:
