“Growing up as a woman in America, you’re always on the lookout for anyone who’s made it, regardless of shared philosophy,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “That’s how rare achieving such heights as she did is for a woman in our country, especially at the time that she achieved it.”
She continued: “It’s not just the fact that she’s a woman who served on our highest court, or the first Jewish woman to serve on our highest court. But it’s how she served. It’s the dissents that she wrote. Even it’s the style in which she did that. Wearing these big, bold collars is not just a sartorial decision. It is a visual communication to women across the country to say: take up space. And when you are in this space, you don’t have to occupy this space in the way that every man before you did. You can be the first, and you can be brazen, as you are the first.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said the fact that the death of a single, important individual could set off the political furor that it had raised “serious questions about the state of democracy in the United States.”
“We have nine unelected Supreme Court justices, and they have lifetime terms, and the majority leader, any given majority leader in the Senate, can manipulate rules and leverage their position of power to deny even a president the ability to appoint a justice,” she said. “I think one of the things that it prompts a lot of people to do is actually question how democratic many of our institutions are.”
