Roe Overturned: Action Items | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - YouTube - June 26
After a busy day of activism, she got a chance to go online. She said that she wanted to assure us that we have things that we can do beyond voting. Necessary but not sufficient, and I agree. One must vote, but it's not enough to vote.
I like that AOC knows about "necessary but not sufficient". If X implies Y, then Y is a necessary condition for X, and X a sufficient condition for Y.
Necessity and sufficiency
She challenges critics to come up with plans of their own. Then discusses what actions one can take, like donating to abortion funds. She asks her listeners if they can let visiting abortion seekers stay in their homes. "Everybody have something to give." Like some talent: being an artist or a writer, or having digital skills. What can one do "on a consistent basis"?
She asks that because the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, despite being huge, didn't have as much followup as was necessary to make the desired changes, and many communities reverted to how they were before.
Then how the overturning of RvW affects everybody, especially poor and minority women. She then said that small actions can add up, as sand in the gears of the horrible machine of right-wing oppression. Important to be willing to discuss abortion.
She says that her colleagues ought to consider funding not themselves but colleagues in frontline (vulnerable) seats. I note Katie Porter D-CA-47, who got 51% of the vote in the primary, with the Republicans getting a combined total of 49%.
AOC listed Ohio, supporting Tim Ryan against someone that she did not want to name. Why does she consider JD Vance so odious? Georgia. Iowa - House seat imperiled: presumably Cindy Axne D-IA-03. She suggests adopting some swing seat.
She recommends voting in primaries, and she recommended assessing whether antiabortion Democrats ought to continue. Also those who don't do much other than do the bidding of big donors. She recommends looking at state elections and local elections.
She then got into policy issues, saying that the Democratic Party is not doing enough for ordinary people. Some people in high places wring their hands and say that we can't do this and we can't do that, and she asked what they propose to do. She prefers: no = try something else, not give up.
She mentions opening abortion clinics on Federal land in red states. She then praises Rep. Ayanna Pressley for opposing the Hyde Amendment. But some people turned cowardly about doing so.
She recalled the Trump Admin responding to criticism of its actions with going ahead until stopped. She proposes doing the same sort of thing - that even a small bit of action before the courts strike something down is better than nothing.
She then got into the issue of whether or not some Supreme Court Justice candidates lied about their positions on RvW to get into that court. She said that it would be dangerous to normalize the precedent of such lying. Then discussing jumping back and forth about states' rights and what to use as precedent, like on guns. Then on releasing some documents connected to the January 6 insurrection - all but Clarence Thomas, whose wife is one of the insurrectionists, giving him a conflict of interest that he has refused to acknowledge.
She then noted that Abraham Lincoln ignored the Dred Scott decision when he issued his Emancipation Proclamation. Then FDR responding to the Supreme Court striking down New Deal stuff by threatening to pack that court with his appointees. The court backed down.
Then she returned to doing research on candidates. One should adopt some swing-seat candidate to support. One should also push politicians to say what they willing to do, as opposed to saying that they can't do this, that, or the other. AOC herself has done a commendable job of that, I must say. It's not enough to get people's votes and then do nothing with the power that those votes has given one.
She then gets into some endorsements, and she said that soon after she got elected, she contributed to several swing-district Democrats. I recall that there was some controversy about her doing so, because many of her intended recipients didn't want to be associated with her. "Here is a bribe I won't take", it seems like to me. She also bragged about some bacon she brought home, support of the reproductive-health facilities of the Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, NYC. But all bacon is pork.
on Twitter: "Matt Gaetz today:
