WATCH: AOC Calls out Joe Manchin’s ‘Egregious Breach of Trust’ of President Biden
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tore into Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) for upending President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better spending agenda.
Manchin announced his intention not to vote for the bill on Sunday, drawing a torrent of anger from the White House and from progressive members of Congress. Ocasio-Cortez was among those displeased with Manchin, though she primarily called out Democrat leaders by suggesting they let this happen by not attaching Build Back Better to the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill.
When a handful of us in the House warned this would happen if Dem leaders gave Manchin everything he wanted 1st by moving BIF before BBB instead of passing together, many ridiculed our position.
Maybe they’ll believe us next time. Or maybe people will just keep calling us naïve. https://t.co/TtKW6VOOCF
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 19, 2021
On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez spoke to Morning Joe about Manchin, calling his refusal to support “an egregious breach of the trust of the president,” but also “an outcome we warned about well over a month ago.”
“Of course we have every right to be furious with Joe Manchin,” she said, “but it’s really up to leadership in the Democratic Party who made the decision to get us to this juncture and how we’re going to move forward. I think right now that Democratic leadership has a very large number of tools at their disposal, the president particularly. And it’s really about time that we take the kid gloves off and start using them to govern for working families in this country.”
Joe Scarborough acknowledged Ocasio-Cortez’s slams on Democratic leadership, but since Manchin’s decision comes despite numerous talks with Biden, Scarborough wondered “how do you work with the White House moving forward?” Ocasio-Cortez reiterated her argument that separating Build Back Better from infrastructure was a mistake, but since Biden claimed to be capable of bringing Manchin on board, her retort was “with respect to the president, no one can really promise a Manchin vote.”
We need to really figure out what the solution is, because at the end of the day, when the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s, we are talking about millions of families in the United States having their child tax credits expire. The president made the announcement just this past week that he does not have an intention on extending the student loan deadline. And both of these things, in addition to the untenable situation of voting rights in this country, all three of these things are completely unacceptable. And so what we really need to do is, I think, is have folks that really know — our leadership needs to step up. And I think that we can do that. I do not believe that the situation is beyond repair. But it’s going to take a different kind of thinking to get out of it than it did to get into it.
Watch above, via MSNBC.
