During The Campaign, AOC Floated a “SUB-CAUCUS” Of Progressives Who’d FLEX Muscle in House Negotiations

During The Campaign, AOC Floated a “SUB-CAUCUS” Of Progressives Who’d FLEX Muscle in House Negotiations

“…Ocasio-Cortez Floats a “Sub-Caucus” of Progressives Willing to Vote Together as a Bloc…”

“…The current CPC, made up of 78 members, is too amorphous to act as a united bloc, which saps it of its strength, Ocasio-Cortez argued. It’s the same rationale that conservatives who built the powerful Freedom Caucus three years ago used when they broke away from the larger Republican Study Committee, the GOP equivalent of the progressive caucus.

“The thing that gives the caucus power is that you can operate as a bloc vote in order to get things done,” Ocasio-Cortez told Daniel Denvir, host of Jacobin’s “The Dig.” “Even if you can carve out a sub-portion, a sub-caucus of the progressive caucus, even if you could carve out that, even a smaller bloc, but one that operates as a bloc, then you could generate real power.”

If Democrats wind up holding a slim majority in future Congresses, a progressive sub-caucus wouldn’t need many members to tip the balance, since leadership would need all of them on board to move forward. “If you can even carve out a caucus of 10, 30 people it does not take a lot, if you operate as a bloc vote, to really make strong demands on things,” she said.

Flashback: during the campaign @AOC floated a "sub-caucus" of progressives who'd flex muscle in House negotiations https://t.co/wyqkaqSwMs

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 3, 2019