Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) seemed to admit on CNN Wednesday night that she is motivated to pursue impeachment because she believes in will unite the Democratic Party and make victory in the 2020 presidential election more likely.
“At the end of the day, we have to be able to come together as a caucus, and if it is this Ukrainian allegation that is what brings the caucus together, then I think we have to run with however we unify the House,” Ocasio-Cortez told Wolf Blitzer, who asked the Congresswoman whether she hoped other potential violations by Trump would be considered in any articles of impeachment.
“. . . We also need to move quite quickly because we’re talking about the potential compromise of the 2020 elections,” Ocasio-Cortez ended. “And so this is not just about something that has occurred; this is about preventing a potentially disastrous outcome from occurring next year.”
The Washington Post reported Thursday that Senate Republicans are considering dragging out any impeachment trial to force senators running for the Democratic presidential nomination to be on Capitol Hill instead of on the campaign trail.
“Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden might like that,” Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) said of the potential plan.
Last weekend, Ocasio-Cortez accused Republicans of turning impeachment into “a partisan issue” by attempting to call Hunter Biden as a witness in the public impeachment hearings.
“They want to distract the American people from the very words that Donald Trump uttered from his mouth in that call with Ukrainian officials trying to extort a foreign government into intervening into the United States elections,” she said in an interview with Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), whom AOC endorsed for president last month. “And, in fact, these witnesses that they’re calling are politically motivated. Republicans are turning this into a partisan issue.”
Ocasio-Cortez has long been a proponent of impeaching the president, saying during her congressional campaign last year that if elected, she would vote to impeach, and clashed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) in the past over Democratic leadership’s unwillingness to move forward with impeachment.
But last month, AOC told supporters that she was “over” the “boring” impeachment inquiry.
“That’s how I feel about it because we’ve got work to do,” she said, before going on to argue that “impeachment of this president is the short-term action we need to preserve our democracy, but if we are really going to thrive as a country, we need to make long-term investments.”
