Alexandria ocasio-cortez

Vice President Kamala Harris was the first presidential candidate since Walter Mondale to skip the traditional Al Smith dinner, which raises money for Catholic Charities, and former president Donald Trump would not let her forget it. He called her absence “deeply disrespectful” to Catholics, earning applause from some in the audience. Trump joked, “Instead of attending tonight, she’s in Michigan receiving Communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” referring to a viral video of the Michigan governor feeding a Dorito chip to a liberal activist kneeling before her.

Dumb is dumb. Among the dumbest is a political strategy that harms your own side and infuriates your normal allies, the ones who stand with you on most issues. That describes Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a master of both bad ideas and bad strategies. She’s a bomb-thrower who lights the fuse, gathers her friends around her and then drops the bomb on her own toes. She illustrated those qualities last week, not once but twice. First, she opposed a House bill on antisemitism, which passed easily with bipartisan support. Her reason was that the resolution could be used to attack believing Christians. To prove it, she dredged up medieval calumnies against the Jews as “Christ-killers,” who handed Jesus over to the Roman authorities.

Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests are inspiring a nationwide movement while the Democratic Party finds itself split in two. A group of twenty-one House Democrats called on Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, to end the encampment or resign as progressives such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman joined in the Manhattan university’s protests Friday.The Democratic Party struggles with clashing opinions regarding the broader conflict as well as concerns over electability — particularly as “uncommitted” voters sent a message to President Joe Biden in the primary over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

President Joe Biden signed the foreign aid package, which features $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, on Wednesday after the bill swiftly moved through Congress. The breakdown of aid is as follows: $61 billion for Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel and $8 billion for Taiwan.Speaker Mike Johnson infuriated some of his Republican colleagues by even negotiating on the legislation, let alone bringing it to the House floor for a vote; he previously said he would not move any foreign aid until Democrats agreed to give additional funds for border security. Instead, after the Senate rejected the border security bill HR-2 and Johnson rejected the Senate-negotiated immigration package, the speaker made moves to go ahead with sending money abroad anyway.

Speaker Mike Johnson is extending a high-profile olive branch to one of his biggest intra-party foes of the day: Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Johnson made her one of the impeachment managers as the House hands the reins of the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas to a less-than-excited Senate. Just days ago, Greene was performatively threatening to oust Johnson hours before Congress headed into a multi-week recess. Now, she’s joining with a group of Republicans in asking Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to expeditiously schedule an impeachment hearing for Mayorkas. It’s not just Greene who is obviously being helped out by Johnson with this announcement.

Congress struck a major blow against TikTok's Chinese ownership Thursday morning, by passing the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which would require parent company ByteDance to sell its US entity within six months in order to retain access to American app stores and web hosting services. The bill, passed by a 352-65 margin, now heads to the Senate. It offered a rare time that former president Donald Trump found himself allied with progressive members of the Squad in opposition, while Representatives Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries joined forces in voting for the bill, which would help combat the espionage concerns that intelligence officials in the Biden administration have repeatedly raised.

The Democratic Party is in a state of rhetorical paralysis. This weekend, as Palestinian terrorists streamed across the Israeli border, the White House maintained hours of thunderous silence. On Saturday, the Biden administration released a few limp paragraphs to the effect that “terrorism is never justified” and “Israel has a right to defend itself and its people.” This, after an uninterrupted outpouring of financial and oratorical support for Ukraine, is weak tea. But as the head of a party that is being overrun in not-so-slow motion by a vigorous young coterie of anti-Israel extremists, what more could Joe Biden say?

When Barack Obama set out to fundamentally transform the country, he took for granted that it could be transformed back — and could only look on as America sent a populist billionaire to do just that. The aspiring media mogul has only now discovered that part of a politician's legacy is the successors he leaves behind. It has dawned on Obama that his chief legacy from eight years in office will not be healthcare reform but Joe Biden — and now he is scrambling to cultivate a new champion. Politico is reporting that America's first black president is holding closed-door meetings with the likes of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, socialist darling Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and moderate Michigan representative Haley Stevens to try to find an heir worthy of the crown.

Tensions ran high this week after Jordan Neely, a homeless street performer with a record of violence, was killed by Daniel Penney, a twenty-four-year-old Marine. Penney placed Neely in a chokehold on a New York City subway train. The usual suspects, such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, swung into action, calling the incident “murder” and a “lynching” respectively. Conservative media was alive with dire warnings of potential violent protests in response to this death of a black man at the hands of a white man. But a funny thing happened on the way to the riots: they didn’t occur. So what makes this situation so different from incidents of racially tinged violence in the recent past?

There are moments in history when politicians have to seize an opportunity or watch it pass them by, never to be seen again. We all know the examples. Chris Christie has nightmares about them. But we may be witnessing one of those right now in the Democratic Party, for one of its youngest voices. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be missing her moment. I know that this is the earliest cycle that AOC could potentially even run for president. But the uniquely fragile status of the leader of her party leaves an opening that is clear as day: to upend the hidebound octogenarians of the Democratic elite with a brash, social-media friendly progressive coalition that speaks to the party as it is, not as the establishment imagines it to be.