Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic representative from New York, caught attention with an extremely out-of-character remark regarding congressional Republicans.
AOC joined a growing number of Democrats looking to collaborate with President-elect Donald Trump during his second term. Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the progressive wing of her party in Congress, told Punchbowl News on Wednesday that she would support Trump’s policies that align with her values.
“The reason why I think oftentimes Democrats occasionally lose elections is because we’re too reflexively anti-Republican, and that we don’t lean into an ambitious vision for working-class Americans strongly enough,” she told the outlet.
In recent election cycles, Democrats have focused much more on changing the American culture by focusing on gender, diversity, and other far-left issues like climate change while merely paying lip service to so-called “kitchen table issues” like food inflation and high gas and home prices.
Punchbowl News reported that many Democrats are adopting a different approach than the resistance-style tactics seen during Trump’s first term.
Several issues where some Democrats believe they can find common ground with the incoming president include securing the border, reforming wasteful government spending, and advancing certain economic reforms.
“I don’t think the American people want extremism, but they do want changes at the border,” Florida Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz told the outlet.
The lawmaker stated that his party is addressing their election loss by recognizing their disconnect with voters on critical issues, such as immigration. “On some of these issues, we were to the left of the American people,” he admitted.
Several Democrats supported the Laken Riley Act, an immigration reform bill that passed the House on Tuesday. According to Punchbowl News, 48 Democrats in the lower chamber voted in favor of the bill, marking an increase of 11 votes from the previous Congress.
“We should pursue every opportunity around border security and immigration reform,” Ohio Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman, who did support the bill, told the outlet.
“That’s number one, and number two is getting costs down,” he added.
Also, a stunning 60 Democrats joined with Republicans to pass legislation in the House brought by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace titled Preventing Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act.
The bill passed by a vote of 274-145 with more than a quarter of the minority party supporting it on Thursday.
“We are fed up with headlines about women losing their lives or becoming victims of assailants who trespassed into our country illegally under the Biden-Harris border crisis,” the representative said. “This legislation sends a strong message: if you are an illegal who has committed acts of violence against women, you will not find sanctuary here.”
But the 158 Democrats who voted against it claimed that it demonized illegal immigrants.
“Here we are again, debating another partisan bill that fearmongers about immigrants instead of working together to fix the immigration system,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said as the legislation was being debated. “I probably shouldn’t be too surprised. Scapegoating immigrants and attempting to weaponize the crime of domestic violence is appearing to be a time-honored tradition for Republicans.”
Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York said that Republicans were trying to “scapegoat and fearmonger about immigrants.”
“The redundancies in this bill,” he said, “all but assure that no additional dangerous individuals would face immigration consequences if it were to become law.”
But Mace stood strong during the debate.
“Our country has been ravaged by a horror of illegal immigrants…violently raping American women and girls,” she said. “I know the lifelong scars, the irreversible scars these heinous crimes leave behind.”