• 3 days ago
"This is about American lives. And it should not be partisan." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tore into a House Republican after he mocked the Green New Deal.
Transcript
00:00People are dying. They are dying.
00:03And the response across the other side of the aisle is to introduce an amendment five minutes before a hearing and a markup?
00:10This is serious. This should not be a partisan issue.
00:14One year ago, I was waitressing in a taco shop in downtown Manhattan.
00:31I just got health insurance for the first time a month ago.
00:36This is not an elitist issue. This is a quality of life issue.
00:41You want to tell people that their concern and their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist?
00:48Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx, which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country.
00:54Tell that to the families in Flint, whose kids, their blood is ascending in lead levels.
01:01Their brains are damaged for the rest of their lives. Call them elitist.
01:05You're telling them that those kids are trying to get on a plane to Davos?
01:09People are dying. They are dying.
01:12And the response across the other side of the aisle is to introduce an amendment five minutes before a hearing and a markup?
01:19This is serious. This should not be a partisan issue.
01:38This is about our constituents and all of our lives. Iowa, Nebraska, broad swaths of the Midwest are drowning right now.
01:47Underwater. Farms. Towns that will never be recovered and never come back.
01:52And we're here and people are more concerned about helping oil companies than helping their own families?
01:58I don't think so. I don't think so.
02:01This is about our lives. This is about American lives.
02:05And it should not be partisan. Science should not be partisan.
02:10We are facing a national crisis and if we do not ascend to that crisis,
02:17if we do not ascend to the levels in which we were threatened at the Great Depression,
02:23when we were threatened in World War II, if we do not ascend to those levels,
02:27if we tell the American public that we are more willing to invest and bail out big banks
02:33than we are willing to invest in our farmers and our urban families,
02:37then I don't know what we're here doing. I don't know what we're here doing.

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