Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Desperately Tried to Open the Government Within 24 Hours

Last night, in a ponytail with straggly hairs, it’s undeniable that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was beat. Within the span of 24 hours, the congresswoman appeared to be all over Capitol Hill yesterday trying desperately to reopen the government, unfortunately to no avail.

Her day began by searching for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who has the authority to end the government shutdown. Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow freshman democrat lawmakers looked for McConnell basically everywhere in order to give him a letter urging him to reopen the government.

“The focus is to try to get the Senate to see the human toll that it’s taken on many of our folks back home to get the government back up and running,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib said, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Ocasio-Cortez used Twitter to tell the public, and McConnell that they were looking for him. She tweeted: We at the House are doing *our* job passing bills reopen government, so why won’t @senatemajldr do his? We left to drop off letters to: His Sen Majority Leader office, The GOP cloak room, The Senate floor, His Senate office.” And yet they could not locate the Majority Leader.

He’s not in the cloak room
He’s not in the Capitol
He’s not in the Russel building
He’s not on the floor of the Senate

And 800,000 people still don’t have their paychecks – so #WheresMitch? https://t.co/x3qOfC113M

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 17, 2019

Later in the evening she gave a heartfelt speech on the House Floor and spoke about one of her constituents from her district in New York City. She said he was a federal worker for the past 14 years, a husband and father of two, that hasn’t been getting paid.

“The truth of this shutdown is that it’s actually not about a wall…The truth is, this shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms.” And added, that “It is not normal to hold 800,000 workers’ paychecks, hostage. It is not normal to shut down the government when we don’t get what we want. It is not normal for public servants to run away and hide from the public that they serve,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And it is certainly not normal to starve the people we serve for a proposal that is wildly unpopular among the American people.”

Here’s her speech below.

First House Floor speech from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC): “The truth of this shutdown is that it's actually not about a wall…The truth is, this shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms." pic.twitter.com/r8tmsGSNtT

— CSPAN (@cspan) January 17, 2019

While she didn’t reopen the government, she gave a helluva speech. She tweeted soon afterward “Excited to have made my first remarks on the House floor today!”

If that wasn’t enough of a hectic day at work, today she’s teaching her democratic colleagues how to use Twitter. What a boss.