House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) may have overstayed her welcome. For some reason—maybe it’s jealousy, maybe it’s because the new crop of freshmen members of Congress—Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) refuse to kiss the ring—the senior congresswoman keeps coming for them and keeps embarrassing herself.
Over the weekend, Pelosi came for Ocasio-Cortez during a New York Times interview and quickly realized that her arms were too short to outbox the Twitter god.
“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” Pelosi told Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
It didn’t take long for AOC to log on to Twitter to gather Pelosi’s old ass up.
“That public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment,” she wrote (and yes, there is an implied “bitch” at the end of that drag.) AOC also noted that public sentiment is how change is achieved and that the old guard (looking at you, NP) is out of touch with the Democrats’ base.
The fab freshmen weren’t done tongue-whipping the senior seat holder during the president’s State of the Union speeches. On Sunday, ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked Rep. Tlaib about Pelosi’s comments and the Michigan lawmaker didn’t pull any punches.
After Raddatz quoted Pelosi’s claim that Tlaib and the three other Congress members had made themselves “irrelevant” on border concerns after they voted against a border funding bill, Tlaib shot back.
“You know people like us, people like me and Ayanna, Ilhan and Alexandria, we’re reflective of our nation in many ways. But many of us didn’t run to be first of anything, but more people like us have been missing in the halls of Congress. More people like us, people of color have been missing in the chamber because most of us—and Ayanna Pressley says it more beautifully—people that are closest to the pain needs to be at the table making these decisions,” Tlaib replied, Mediaite reports.
“Guess what, we know what it feels like to be dehumanized. We know what it feels like to be brown and black in this country,” she continued, making it clear that Pelosi doesn’t know this struggle.
“And I’ll tell you right now, we’re not going to stand by and sit idly by and allow brown and dark-skinned children to be ripped away from their parents to be dehumanized,” she added.
Knowing that she was making good TV, Raddatz asked Tlaib: “What would you say to Nancy Pelosi? What would you say directly to Nancy Pelosi?”
“Honor the fact we are there, that 650,000 people are represented by each and every single one of us, that there is some sort of, I think in many ways, something special about having a refugee, having a woman that, you know, has experienced alone what incarceration has done to her family, right,” said Tlaib, Mediaite reports. “All of us have these experiences that I think have been missing in the halls of Congress.
“Honor that, respect that, put us at the table,” said Tlaib. “Let’s come up with a solution together. Uplift the women, especially the women of color, within your caucus that are out there because, I’ll tell you, more people like us, more people like me that come out to vote, we win, all of us win.” Mediaite notes that at this point, Raddatz cut in to tell her they were out of time but Tlaib was on a roll.
“It is very disappointing that the speaker would ever try to diminish our voices in so many ways.” And with that last parting shot, the show cut to a break.
Pelosi was reportedly seen dolphin-clapping in front of her TV before an aide told her that the attacks were against her. She then began pressing her medic alert bracelet and yelling, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”