Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-N.Y., speculated this weekend that presidential candidate Joe Biden will “likely” move farther to the Left once elected due to the influence of the Democratic Party’s left-wing.
When asked if she and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., are concerned that Biden is too moderate for their platforms, Ocasio-Cortez said that she “of course” shares Sanders’s concerns.
“We’re different people, and clearly I, in the primary, one of the reasons why I was supportive of Sen. Sanders was because of how progressive his stances are,” she told Just the News.
“But, you know, the primaries are over and right now what is most important is to make sure that we ensure a Democratic victory in November,” she added.
Ocasio–Cortez said that some of the issues she hoped to twist Biden’s arm on were marijuana, climate change and foreign policy.
However, she did not elaborate on what foreign policy she hoped to redirect the fervently pro-China Biden toward.
Historically, there have been strong links between Sanders’s Congressional Progressive Caucus and the International Communist Party, over which China exerts an outsize influence.
“I think, overall, we can likely push Vice President Biden in a more progressive direction across policy issues,” she reiterated. “I think foreign policy is an enormous area where we can improve — immigration is another one.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s comments confirm what President Trump and the GOP have been saying for months: Biden would be a “Trojan horse” for the radical leftists in his party.
Already, he has allowed extremists like Ocasio–Cortez to dictate his environmental platform, and he has caved on several cultural issues too.
After giving Ocasio–Cortez a seat on his campaign’s environmental advisory committee, Biden announced this summer that he would be embracing the Green New Deal in all but name.
His new climate plan now demands that the U.S. achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 at the latest, and it introduces a plan to force coal workers transition into a different line of work.
“Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face,” his climate plan states.
“It powerfully captures two basic truths,” it says.
The first is that “the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of this challenge,” and the second is that “our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected.”
It was because of this leftist pressure that Biden also embraced a ban on fracking, which he has since denied.
Similarly, Biden reversed his long-standing support for the Hyde Amendment, a law that prohibits taxpayer dollars from being used to fund abortions, after leftists in his party demanded that he disavow it.
“If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s ZIP code,” he announced last year.
Another area of concern for Ocasio–Cortez is Biden’s health care policy, she said.
She admitted that Biden’s campaign has been “pretty stubborn” on this issue, but said she will continue to push Biden to embrace Sanders’s ‘Medicare for All’ bill, of which Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., was a sponsor.
“There are some areas where we just fundamentally disagree, but that’s OK,” she told Just the News.
“I think it’s important to acknowledge that we can have, in some cases, very large disagreements—it doesn’t mean that we’re trying to undermine the party or undermine each other,” she continued. “It means that we’re trying to do what’s best for people in the country.”
