AOC on The Green New Deal's Anniversary

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. On today's show, WNYC's Bahar Ostadan on the EBT scams plaguing many New Yorkers. When you go to use your EBT card at a grocery store for SNAP benefits, you might be at risk of having your card surreptitiously scanned and the money on it drained. We will invite you to help us do the reporting with your stories on the phones, and Bahar will explain how it happens and what can be done about it. We will also have a member of the New York State Assembly who's got a piece of legislation that should help prevent this for the future.

Also, we'll continue our series with the makers of the five Oscar-nominated feature length documentaries. Other people do the hit movies, we do the documentaries. Today, the director of a nominated film from Chile called The Eternal Memory about a couple of dealing with one partner's Alzheimer's disease that also has a national politics Alzheimer's overlay, and we begin here. Actually, before we begin here one other thing. On today's show, we will have Charley Locke on their essay in Vox about why it's sometimes good to have regrets with your calls on how regrets have ever made your life or the world better.

Here is where we begin. It's our Climate Story of the Week, which we do every Tuesday on the show. Today we have a special guest to mark an anniversary. It was five years ago this month, February 7th, 2019 when New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in office barely a month, introduced the Green New Deal resolution along with Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. Here's 30 seconds of that moment five years and two weeks ago.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Today is the day that we truly embark on a comprehensive agenda of economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America. That's what this agenda is all about, because climate change in our environmental challenges are one of the biggest existential threats to our way of life, not just as a nation, but as a world.

Brian Lehrer: AOC on February 7th, 2019. How's it going five years later? With us now for our climate story of the week is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez whose district covers parts of northwest Queens and eastern parts of the Bronx. We'll talk about the Green New Deal and other things too. Congresswoman, thanks very much for coming on for this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: So many listeners have heard the term by now from so many lips. Cuomo had a Green New Deal. Everybody's got some version of something used in so many ways. I wonder if you would start by doing a reset for us, building on what you said five years ago and explain how you think listeners should even understand the term Green New Deal today before we discuss how it's going on or any debate around it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Of course. Thank you. I appreciate that. It's an excellent question because for a long time, for decades, we've had people talk about environmental policy or climate policy, and there's a central question about what makes Green New Deal policy different than any of those others. What really I think, distinguishes Green New Deal style policy is that instead of treating economic growth and environmental protection and environmental justice and social justice issues as competing interests, Green New Deal policy says climate policy is not effective or complete unless it meets three standards.

The first is unless it has an aggressive 10-year decarbonization timeline. The second is it must create good union jobs, and it must create good high quality jobs. The third is that it cannot leave any communities behind, in that it must incorporate environmental justice, including social and racial justice components, as well as economic justice components, as part of the policy.

Too often, we would see climate policy that would do one or the other. It may meet a scientific target, except you would have poor or Black and Brown communities that do not benefit, or the communities that have been exposed to toxic waste, air, water, et cetera that would be left behind. Or there would be almost this sense of competition between job creation and environmental protection and conservation. What Green New Deal policy does is that it creates jobs, it centers on environmental justice communities, and it ensures that we meet our climate targets, so that we can save the planet.

Brian Lehrer: Staying on the history for a minute, and picking up on what you were just saying about good union jobs and social justice components, you probably know there's a book that came out in the fall by Ryan Grim from The Intercept called The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution. He's got an excerpt that I was reading on The Intercept site that includes a description of the competing interests of groups in the Democratic Party coalition as you were preparing the resolution five years ago, such as the NAACP was against a carbon tax or any form of carbon pricing because they thought that would allow rich companies to buy up those rights and continue to put their polluting plants in Black neighborhoods, and a tax would also raise energy prices disproportionately on poor and working class folks.

They wanted a way to eliminate fossil fuels, not tax them, but the AFL-CIO opposed a call to end fossil fuels because there were so many good jobs in the field. You had to thread the needle in various ways, as Ryan Grim reminds us. How much on the same page do you think various progressive groups are today around that concept?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Oh, I think there's been a sea change. I think that we have made incredible progress. A lot of that is in no small part thanks to the advocacy and power of all of the organizing and the energy behind Green New Deal. organizing really was a driving force behind the Inflation Reduction Act that the president signed, that Congress passed two years ago, which has ended up becoming and culminating in the largest US federal investment to combat climate change in American history. What that legislation did was that it profoundly realigned the economic incentives to combat climate change.

You're absolutely correct. There were a tremendous amount of those fault lines, both even within a pro-climate coalition, but generally, as well, alongside all of these questions. Now, whereas before, there was a lot of debates around carbon taxes and the number of jobs in the fossil fuel industry, we have now worked to even the playing field where there's a tremendous amount of tax incentive for renewable energy, and as well as union job creating renewable energy projects, made in America projects, and more.

What those tax incentives do is not only do they incentivize that right kind of production, but they also make it more affordable for everyday people to access it. Examples of that are the EV tax credit or tax credits on heat pumps, so that people can update and make their heating much more efficient at a much more affordable price. It is hard to overstate how much it has realigned the landscape. Previously, where there were folks on the opposite ends of certain climate questions, they've now been aligned to the same side of things as well. It has done so much to accelerate our progress in meeting our climate targets.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we welcome your questions for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the Green New Deal resolution at five years old. A few on other topics are okay too, as we will branch out a little as well. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text questions, no speeches please, 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. That was really interesting about how different groups, different constituencies have gotten on the same page.

I want to ask you about Biden. At first he didn't even want to use the term Green New Deal, I think, in part to differentiate himself from you when he was running for president. But his post-pandemic bill known as Build Back Better, as you know, was supposed to combine climate provisions with FDR-style New Deal-like provisions like universal pre-K, affordable housing, we expanded Child Tax Credit, more home health aid eligibility and better pay for them.

When it got scaled down into the bill that passed that you were just referring to, the Inflation Reduction Act, I was actually surprised that the part that survived the most- -was the climate part. Because I thought all those family-focused items would be popular across party lines out in America. Families crave and need all those things, I don't have to tell you, and that climate items would never get past Senator Joe Manchin from coal country, but exactly the opposite happened. Why do you think it came out the way it did?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Well, I think there's a couple of reasons. One is that, of course, we fought so incredibly hard for these family items, the essential nature of the Child Tax Credit, and how that transformed not just people's lives, but the entire country. Child poverty was cut in half. It was one of the items that we had fought hardest to preserve, but as you mentioned, conservative resistance to it was too high. I think what Republicans saw in that was in their platform of so-called fiscal responsibility, which I don't see what's so fiscally responsible about not cutting child poverty in half and essentially doubling child poverty in the United States, but that's a different aside.

The line items and the price tags on those, they felt were too high. What we saw as these transformative family investments, and I see them as investments because they generate a profound amount of economic activity, did have a lot of resistance. Senator Joe Manchin specifically cited his resistance to the Child Tax Credit. I think they saw it almost as a giveaway. When it really became a partisan issue, which, as you noted, I felt it shouldn't have been, I think a lot of people felt it shouldn't have been, but unfortunately, Republicans developed this very rank partisan resistance to some of those items.

When it came to the climate piece, what is interesting is that I think it spoke to a couple of things as to why it survived. One is that I think one of the stories of this time that isn't being told enough is how powerful mass movements are getting in the United States. I know there's a lot of doom and gloom out there, but when you think about all of the things that we have accomplished despite resistance and speculation, not from one but from both parties, I think we are starting to see really a story of how everyday organizing from Americans are transforming our political landscape, whether our elected leadership is predisposed to it or not at times.

I think that's the story of what happened with this climate piece. The saliency of the climate issue, not just when we introduced the Green New Deal, but in general has become so strong and so animating, particularly among young people. We were having sit-ins, we were having mass arrests, we were having large protests, marches, and importantly, people were voting on the issue. Young people were voting on the issue, climate justice communities were asking greater questions about it. It became a real point of political pressure.

I think A, that was a major piece of this but then also, secondly, we are also reaching the science. No matter where you are in the country, we are starting to see everybody affected by the climate crisis and importantly, everybody recognizing that it's the climate crisis that they are experiencing. Farmers in rural areas are seeing their crop yields drop and they know better than almost anybody else the sensitivities and nuances between how the seasons are changing. They have to count the weeks that they are able to harvest, the weeks that they are able to make sure that they are tracking everything that's going on and they see it themselves. They know something that has to be done.

There are communities that are experiencing record flooding in both red states and blue states. There's also industry that knows and understands that the level of investment that we need cannot come from the private sector alone. It must be a public investment to really dramatically transform our infrastructure, create the jobs, create the skill levels and education investments necessary for us to tackle this. That was our goal when we first launched the Green New Deal. It was to unite these coalitions. As we continued to do that, we started to pave the way for this legislation.

When it comes to someone like Joe Manchin, I think there was also just a bit of-- we can work as hard as we can in politics, but then there are just fortuitous moments. Part of that was when Senator Manchin spiked the Build Back Better bill about six or seven months prior to the Inflation Reduction Act. There was a profound anger and bitterness in the party. You don't want to work with someone who is going to string along our party for a year just to kill one of the biggest opportunities the country has had at the last minute.

This is speculative, but I think the blowback from it might have been unexpected. It was a moment where we needed an olive branch. It became very clear that we have to do something and we have to do something to help make people's lives better. I actually think that the pressure from that as well, the commitment to that, and frankly, a Democratic Party that was willing to have some teeth and not just forget something like that, is actually what created a little bit of enough friction to move us forward.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting take on history, and yet it looks like climate policy will be central to this fall's elections. When we started this Climate Story of the Week that we do every Tuesday on this show at the beginning of 2023, the idea was that there wasn't regular climate coverage because the climate changes slowly, not like the news cycle in the media traditionally. Yet there was constant climate coverage all over the media in 2023 because there were so many climate-related extreme weather events. What a year it was grabbing people's attention in some of the ways that you said?

Yet Trump said just a few weeks ago that-- you remember this, he said he would only act like a dictator on day one in order to do two things, build that wall and drill, baby, drill. I think that's his authoritarian way of tapping into many Americans' actual fears that aggressive climate policies make energy costs more expensive for years to come, faster than they save people from climate disasters. Would you make that case about cost? Because I think that's going to be important to this election year.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Yes, absolutely. I think the thing that's important for us to remember is that cost volatility is actually all about fossil fuel dependency. The more that we are dependent on fossil fuels, it means the more we are dependent on global events, as we saw with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as we see with the choices that come out of the UAE, and as well as many other regions of the world, oil and gas development and drilling in Latin America as well as in the United States. The more dependent we are on oil and gas, the more crazy our prices are going to be, and the more up and down our prices are going to be.

The fact that, for example, we have not developed electric or alternative energy vehicles earlier is one of the reasons why we pay such close attention to gas prices to begin with. We would not be as sensitive to the changes in energy costs if we weren't so fossil fuel dependent. Donald Trump knows that, the oil and gas industry knows that, and that is why they finance huge parts of lobbying our government in order to keep the country entirely dependent on fossil fuels.

Now, if you prefer gas cars and gas stoves, you're free to make that choice, but what we haven't had is accessible and broad choices for something else. EVs have been in development, but for a very long time, they've been financially inaccessible to a lot of people in this country. The Inflation Reduction Act helped change that. We got huge tax breaks for both new and used EVs, if you're trying to buy one off your neighbor or whatever that may be, as well as many other things that are accessible, whether it's induction stoves, heat pumps for one's home, et cetera.

The oil and gas industry- -is deploying all of their political and special interest money towards one central goal, which is to keep virtually every American completely dependent on their product and Donald Trump is very closely aligned with them. Not only that, but the larger point that you made is that it's not a coincidence that his authoritarian tactics are tied to fossil fuels. This is a global phenomenon, and what we are seeing is authoritarianism is very, very closely linked with oil and gas interests around the world. That's Putin, that's Trump, that's folks like Bolsonaro, that's a lot of the political instability we see out of Saudi Arabia, the UAE.

I believe that it is not a coincidence because you have one central industry that has a clear vested both political and financial interest and an authoritarian-- that is also increasingly becoming politically unpopular, by the way, because the vast majority of Americans believe that the US should start winding down our subsidization of the fossil fuel industry. They want to see clean energy alternatives available to them and financially accessible to them, and they understand that it's just more volatile to be so chained to fossil fuels.

The only way that you can really empower both financially, a political sect is through the fossil fuel industry, the oil and gas industry. The Koch brothers, who had such large influence on our political system, they come from an oil and gas dynasty, or rather came, one of them has passed. There's that, but then you see that link crossing across the world and the ascent of authoritarianism paired with the fact that every single one of them is very closely aligned to the fossil fuel industry, and the ascent of the fossil fuel industry is not a coincidence. It's not a mistake.

In fact, the democratization of our energy system, A, which is a means of production that has been privatized and concentrated into the hands of the very few, the democratization of our energy system means that people have the potential. We're doing this in Puerto Rico. When you have a battery pack on your house, when the power goes out, you're not as dependent on a central system. You have a backup reserve in case of an emergency. You can give energy to your neighbor. This is what the democratization of our energy system looks like. This is also what a fair economic system that is less volatile for everyday people looks like as well.

That is a direct threat to authoritarianism, it's a direct threat to the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of the very few, but it also represents a shift for the betterment of mankind and our democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Such an interesting collection of connections. One more question on this for the moment, and then we'll take some phone calls. Listeners, if you're just tuning in, my guest is Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the context of our weekly Climate Story of the Week, which we do every Tuesday on the show on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the Green New Deal resolution being introduced in Congress by her in 2019, along with Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. We will also talk about some other things. You know people want to hear you on young voters and Biden, you know people want to hear you on Gaza. Listeners, 212-433-WNYC with calls or texts if you have a question.

I see that last year for the fourth anniversary of the resolution, you and Senator Markey released what you called a Green New Deal Implementation Guide designed to help individuals and communities take best advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act right away. I'm just curious if you would make that local for your actual constituents in your district in Queens and the Bronx, and give an example or two if you have them, of how your own implementation guide can best help them or is already doing so.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you. Quick plug. If you are, especially if you run a community organization or are interested in some of that work, we have that implementation guide on our website, ocasio-cortez.house.gov. A lot of that is really inspired by what sometimes the lobbyists do, where you'll have this big massive bill and there's all these line items with all these financial opportunities, incentives, et cetera. They will have folks go in and try to figure out what works and how big companies can take advantage of these bills right away.

We don't, and haven't historically had that same effort for everyday people, community organizations, even cities and municipalities to say, "Hey, all this stuff passed in this bill, but you may not know how many opportunities there are and the ways that it can help you.” Our Green New Deal Implementation Guide does that. It shows all of the grants, all of the tax opportunities, et cetera, that are available to both individuals and community organizations, municipalities, et cetera, that are interested and/or potentially already eligible for some of the investments in there. There are so many. I definitely encourage folks to dig through it and see what's available to them.

There are a couple of really exciting things that we've been able to do. We worked in order to secure both, not just with the Inflation Reduction Act, but also with several other bills that had passed Congress to get a couple of major investments in New York City. One was that we are receiving this-- we've worked so that the city can receive nearly $69 million to transition all of our school buses to electric and low-emission school buses, which I can't overstate how important that is for our kids. The Bronx has some of the highest childhood asthma rates in the country. Vehicles, especially large vehicle emissions are a big part of that story as to why, not the only part, but a big part. Switching our New York City School buses to electric when kids are riding in them all day has huge effects both for their health and for the overall air quality of the city.

We've got-- speaking on that piece, we're working on this large visionary project of capping the cross Bronx expressway that a lot of Bronx activists and Bronx environmental justice organizations are starting to mobilize for and demand. It's a major visionary ambitious project, and they know that and they're going for it. As their member of Congress, I support them. Ensuring that we get the federal grants to start the studies to figure out how we can scope that out and make it happen has been a big part of our work as well.

We've received huge investments to put electric charging stations in Hunts Point. We are working on a reliable Clean City Queens transmission line with Con Edison. My goal has always been to show that New York's 14th Congressional District can actually lead the country in showing how a clean energy transition centered on the working class can really be the tip of the spear for the rest of the country.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and your calls and texts, topics in addition to climate as well. Stay with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, mostly in the context of our Climate Story of the Week. We're going to take a pushback call here, Congresswoman, because that's part of what we do here.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Of course.

Brian Lehrer: Bob in Rye, you're on WNYC. Hello, Bob.

Bob: Hello. Thank you for taking my call. The congresswoman's list of points of issues trying to couple fossil fuels with tyranny and despots and all those kinds of things are interesting. Is an interesting conspiracy theory, but it's almost as bad as those on the right wing. Correlation does not make causation, and that's what her litany of comments amounts to. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. You want to respond?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I mean I totally hear it, and heard on the points on correlation versus causation. I think it'd be good for us to zoom in on our own democracy. Let's say we put all of these other folks aside, if we zoom in on our democracy and we look at, especially since the passage of the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court over 10 years ago, what that unleashed in our democracy. I think perhaps one thing that I'd hope we'd be able to have agreement on is that the role of special interests and big money in US elections is corrosive. I hope we can at least start there as something that we can all agree on.

Money plays way too big a role. Big Money plays way too big a role in our elections. When we look at some of the largest sources of where that money comes from, it is not just or only the fossil fuel industry. We also see huge investments from things like big pharma. We see huge investments from, for example, areas of the housing and real estate industry that is incentivized on keeping rent and mortgage prices very high, banking, et cetera.

I think when we look at the erosion of our own democracy, we can see how special interests and big money interests have taken and moved our democracy away from everyday voters, and the will of everyday people, and towards large industries that are investing in lobbying our elected officials. When you look at one of the largest sources of that, fossil fuels is one of them. I would just say that it's something to consider.

Brian Lehrer: Another pushback question comes from the listener in a text message on what they refer to as the elephant in the room. She voted no on the Infrastructure Bill and is now taking credit for it. She also just voted no on the recent Child Tax Bill. Your response?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: On the bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, I think it's important to note that, I have been supportive of the bill. I was supportive of the bill during the drafting. The reason I voted no is because as representative of New York's 14th Congressional District, I had to fight for NYCHA. We had a deal. We had a commitment from the entirety of the party to ensure that we would not leave our NYCHA residents behind, that we would pair Build Back Better with the bipartisan Infrastructure Law, that we would try to save the Build Back Better bill.

At that time, we have folks in NYCHA that are sleeping without heat, who we'd still were discovering lead, in a lot of their apartments. I had felt at the time that people deserved both things, that if you wanted this bill to be passed, you were going to get what you wanted, but it was going to pass. If you were one of those folks that were being left behind by that bill, and you want to see someone stand up for you and fight for you, that you merited that representation and deserve that representation as well.

Brian Lehrer: It was like you felt free to vote against it because you knew it would pass.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Well, I think it was both. I think that even if it didn't pass, I felt like we still had the leverage. My assessment at the time was that I felt like we could still fight for Build Back Better. We needed both of these bills, and we were working for months for both of these bills to be linked and to the passed, and I wasn't ready to give up on that at that juncture. I felt like we could get both.

Brian Lehrer: Judith-- [crosstalk]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sorry. Did you want to finish some answers? Didn't mean to cut you off.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: No, no, I felt like we could get both. By the way, Congress still has to act on NYCHA. I had felt it was our best opportunity to date in order to get the then $40 billion, now much more capital investment necessary to change people's lives out here.

Brian Lehrer: Judith in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Hi, Judith.

Judith: I wish you were mine, and I bless your mother 1,000 times for bringing you into the world. You're just wonderful.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Oh, thank you, Judith.

Judith: I wish to know the policy that you have about Gaza. I also want to know how is the Democratic Party going to survive with so much anger about the Gaza policy, not representing our values in humanity.

Brian Lehrer: Judith, thank you very much. I want to make her question about where you stand on Gaza specific to the moment if that's okay. It's about what ceasefire you're calling for. I think everybody knows you've been in the ceasefire camp. Right now, many in the protest movement are calling for a permanent ceasefire, but there's also a UN proposal set to be coming from the United States that would call for a temporary ceasefire contingent on all the hostages being released, and that also warns against Israeli action in Rafah that doesn't include real protection for those of civilians, which Israel has not announced. Are you for one version or the other of a ceasefire?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Well, I think-- I want to make sure that we're all on the same page here with these terms, because ceasefire is both a legal term, it is a diplomatic term, but at the end of the day, a permanent ceasefire, what that means to folks is a lasting peace. That is absolutely what I am in support of. Now, folks from a different perspective would say, and from a legal perspective, would say ceasefire, technically is a diplomatic term for a time where both sides cease hostilities, cease military hostilities, as they negotiate the terms of a lasting peace, and so that the term ceasefire de facto is temporary, because of the nature of that mean.

To me, I think that I don't want to get into the muck of arguing over terms, because I think the general principle is the same here, which is that I do believe that we need an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and that we must negotiate the terms and figure out the terms of a lasting peace. Now, to Judith's larger question about our stance here, I am extraordinarily concerned with the Netanyahu government, their opposition to President Biden, open defiance of President Biden, particularly when it comes to the establishment of a Palestinian State.

I am highly concerned about the continued indiscriminate bombing of Gazans. I agree with Judith, that this is against our values, and that this is not what Americans believe in, nor what we signed up for. It's important to also acknowledge completely the horror, the trauma of what happened on October 7th, and the complete indiscriminate violence that Hamas had committed. If you are an individual, even if you take Netanyahu at his word where they say that their goal is the complete elimination of Hamas, that is not what this campaign is accomplishing here, anyway. It's not what it's accomplishing here.

What it is accomplishing is tens of thousands of innocent Gazans being killed, nearly 70% of whom are women and children. We are seeing a blockade on humanitarian assistance, food, water. What I am particularly concerned by is the US role, because to a certain extent, Netanyahu, he is a head of state of a separate country. But for us and our decisions-- there was a proposal recently passed by the United States Senate that would block UNRWA funding entirely, which is the main corridor of humanitarian assistance to Gaza.

We should not be enabling or even widening the aperture of possibility for an even greater humanitarian disaster and what we're seeing there in Gaza. I think that we are getting to a point where we cannot participate in this innocent loss of life. We can't. We can't.

Brian Lehrer: In the long run, do you support a two-state solution?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I believe so. I think that what I am concerned by is-- and I have previously stated that I believe that the current legal regime that we are seeing in Israel, particularly with respect to Palestinians amounts to apartheid. I think that a two-state democratic solution is one that I would support, particularly when what we are seeing in the rhetoric of Netanyahu is frankly rhetoric that talks about the complete assimilation and the takeover of Gaza. We see what's happening with settlements in the West Bank. I think that what we cannot stand for is for all Palestinians and Gazans to be subjugated under one larger unjust state, which is the rhetoric that Netanyahu is using. It seems to be what he is insinuating, especially both with what he is saying and his outright resistance to President Biden. I believe that defending the establishment of a Palestinian state is important. I think we are now at the juncture where, while President Biden's words are very much appreciated when he discusses that and acknowledges publicly that Netanyahu and Israel has gone too far and gone overboard, we need to have American diplomacy and our actions reflect that judgment and that conclusion.

Brian Lehrer: That answer sounds like you're also not on the side of that portion of the protest movement which calls for the other kind of one-state solution, no Jewish state per se, rather one pluralistic state. You are coming out for a two-state solution as opposed to that, if I'm hearing you correctly.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Ultimately, this is about the determination that Israelis and Palestinians make. They are the ones whose sovereignty needs to be respected. The reason I'm in favor of a two-state solution is because that is what that sovereignty has determined in the past. I don't think it is our role or my role to impose a solution from the United States onto the region. I think we have to respect the sovereignty of the region and support a lasting peace. At this juncture, that’s what a two-state solution, it is my judgment at this juncture that that’s where we are at. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, and it's about President Biden, and then I know you have to go. There's been increased talk recently of whether Biden is actually still the party's best bet to defeat Donald Trump, assuming Trump is the Republican nominee. Part of that is over the loss of faith in Biden by a lot of young people, the kind of people who would be in your core constituency, not just your district's core constituency, but your constituency around the country as a national figure, with respect to the fact that Biden only talks tough but doesn't act tough with respect to Netanyahu.

Also just because some people think he's not presenting well anymore, and the age issue, fair or not, is going to make him loose. My simple question is, do you still think Joe Biden is the best Democratic nominee

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Yes. I know some folks when it comes to the response on that, and as to why, I think we need to look at the landscape here. I think first of all, there's the general landscape that we are working in. There's also the point in the process that we are working in. We have democratic primaries. We have a small democratic process of going about this and our democratic process has yielded a result. For me, starting with just a due process and a democracy point, I think it's important to acknowledge that this is what our democracy has yielded, and respecting our democratic processes is part of what determines our nominee.

Now, I understand there may be people of differing opinions. I of course believe in primaries. I came to office in a primary. We've had primaries. When we look at where these concerns largely are coming from, it's a lot of media figures discussing this, et cetera. You look at the South Carolina primary, President Biden won with over 90% of the vote, and you had primary challengers in that vote. New Hampshire, President Biden wasn't even on the ballot, and he won overwhelmingly through a write-in campaign. I think whether any given person, any individual, whether President Biden is their chosen nominee or not, or is our preferred nominee or not, this is what our process has yielded.

When we look at the votes on the ground, we are not seeing a resurgence for someone like Dean Phillips. We are not seeing those similar concerns reflected in the electorate. I think there's that first piece. The second piece, especially when it comes to what is being made of the age issue, I do think personally that a lot of it is unfair. Yes, the president might mix up a few words, I've mixed up a few words, he's also handling a war, two impeachment attempts by a rogue party, as well as-- this is probably one of the most challenging times in recent history for our governance in terms of the strain on all of us.

Listen, and I say this as a member of the party, not traditionally in the president's camp. I'm a staunch progressive. I've spent a lot of the president's first term being a thorn in his side. He didn't want to do student loan forgiveness. We pushed him into forgiving student loans for millions of people in this country, and they're still trying to push more. Climate was not top of the agenda. We made it top of the agenda. There are grassroots fights that we don't always win, but we are winning really important ones. I've spent most of his first term being a thorn in his side in order to push and agitate for victories for everyday people.

I think it's important to note that while he is not necessarily predisposed to always being in agreement with us, he's also movable. As someone who seeks to elevate the power of grassroots movements, a movable target is one that I think is something to consider as opposed to an unknown and a potentially unmovable unknown.

Brian Lehrer: I know you got to go. I will just say as a point of pride, speaking of primaries, we are proud that we had you on before you were famous, when you were a little known activist running against Joe Crowley in a local primary. We're glad that you continue to come on and discuss the big issues of our time with us from time to time. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, thank you for coming on today.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Of course. Thank you so much, Brian. I appreciate it.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.