Full Interview: AOC Speaks on the Trump Government Shutdown| Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

In just a few hours at midnight, the federal government is expected to shut down. It will be the first government shutdown since the last time Donald Trump was president. A new poll by NPR, PBS and Marist shows that if the government does shut down tonight, which we fully expect, Americans would blame Republicans more than Democrats, with 38 percent of respondents blaming Republicans, 27 percent blaming Democrats and 31 percent blaming both

parties.

Meanwhile, the president today said from the Oval Office that Democrats are to blame, warned that he would use a shutdown to his political advantage.

A lot of good can come down from shutdowns. We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn't want, and they'd be Democrat things.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat in New York, she's executive board member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and she joins me now. Congresswoman, it does look like we are headed towards a shutdown. What do you see as the Democratic strategy and message here for a government funding

bill?

I mean, Chris, we're here to help people. We are here in the midst of this destruction of the federal government, the federal safety net, a trillion dollars eviscerated from people's health care, their Medicare, their Medicaid. In this country, with prices that are skyrocketing and life becoming completely untenable for the American people, we are here to try to be a backstop and to be that backstop, which is what the American people have elected us to do.

So, right now, there's this sort of back and forth about the ACA tax credits. And there's kind of a strange dynamic that I want to get your sense of, right? Because at one level, negotiating over the ACA tax credits is important. I mean, there are people who are going to see their premiums go up 15, 20 percent. Like, huge amounts are going to spike. Republicans don't like these extenders. Democrats do. They think it's good for people. But that's fully in the lane of, like, normal politics.

And then at the same time, like, the president of the United States assembled 800 military commanders to say, I want you—you're going to have to go to war against your fellow citizens in American cities. I think people are having a little bit of a hard time of like, we're going to have a fight on the shutdown about the tax credits, but not about the president wants to declare war on Americans, even though I understand those two are conceptually distinct.

Do you see what I'm saying?

I see what you're saying, Chris. But you know, I think that's something for us to really set the record straight here on. This is not a fight over tax credits. This is a fight over your ability to go to a pharmacy and afford your insulin. We're not talking about just 15 or 20 percent increases in people's premiums. Tomorrow, health care companies and today, health care

companies are finalizing the premiums that everyday Americans are going to be paying and we are talking about a doubling of monthly health care premiums, not even including your deductible, in terms of what people are going to be paying next year because of a trillion dollars in Medicaid cuts that were put together earlier this year. And I don't know about anybody else, but I do not think that this is just about a tax break or a small tax extender. This is about fighting not just on tax breaks,

community health centers, and ensuring that we have a stability of the American health care system. And when Republicans use a legislative mechanism to gut the American health care system, we have to use a legislative mechanism in order to restore it and to fight for it. Because at the end of the day, you know, people may talk about tax credits this and tax credits that. What they do understand is when you have insulin and you can't afford it.

What they do understand is when your kid has chemotherapy or your spouse gets diagnosed with cancer and you go into a hospital and it doesn't get covered, and you have to choose life and death, what this is about. Now, that does not mean that we ignore the abhorrent violation of law and norms and what is happening with our U.S. cities, but we have a broad spectrum of ways and places that we can fight, including our governors,

our attorney generals and our state and municipal leaders, as you just saw.

So I just want to make sure I understand this just from your perspective here. So, and I think this is generally the view of congressional leadership as well. You can correct me if I'm wrong. If there was bipartisan compromise, right, if everyone came together, the leaders of the parties, the president said, yes, these five things, we're going to make sure that these premium supports keep going.

We're going to fund community health centers, whatever the sort of asks on appropriation around people's affordable health care. If those were met, Democrats would be a yes. Like, that is the box that this is happening in, as opposed to, we can't fund a Department of Justice that prosecutes political enemies or whatever else might be out there.

Well, let me tell you, Chris, the mechanism by which that deal is locked is not just about agreeing in concept on tax credits. We need to do it with no tricks, no games and no backdoors, which includes rescissions. And when we talk about rescissions, that is the mechanism that the federal government is using to gut and destroy rule of law across the board. So we are fighting to ensure that health care is protected for every American.

But the way that we do that also means that the only way that you guarantee that is by forcing them to adhere to the rule of law, which means eliminating the rescission loopholes that they put in in the CR earlier this year, which the Senate, unfortunately, had caved on then, and we're ensuring that doesn't happen now.

Yeah, the quick 10-second version for people that haven't followed this is that, you know, you need 60 votes to get the filibuster to appropriate funds for the government, but they can pass a rescission, which is to claw back some of the money already agreed to, by 50 votes. So they have this kind of like cake-and-eat-it-too model, where it's like, oh, yeah, we'll come together, we'll pass a bipartisan appropriations bill, and then, when we've done that, then we'll go and get rid of the stuff we don't like, which just seems like an insane way to negotiate.

It's no way to negotiate. And again, you know, we don't even have to get into the technicalities of this. But what is important to understand is that the way that you honor an agreement and the way that we honor our fight for health care and to define and to also protect everyday Americans' ability to afford their health care, to to define and to also protect everyday Americans' ability to afford their health care, to cover their kids, to defend Medicaid.

Those are the same mechanisms that we use to defend our rule of law, to defend the federal workers that we are trying to protect in this shutdown. You know, Donald Trump is trying to play this bluffing game of, well, maybe what we're going to do is hold all the federal workforce hostage and fire everybody. Donald Trump has been firing everybody. We saw this with DOJ.

We've seen this at the State Department. We've seen this at the Department of Justice. They are firing everybody. They are completely eliminating the federal workforce. And in order for us to stop this madness, we have to put a stop to it, and we have to stop enabling their abuse of power, including their use of rescissions.

And when we're fighting on their health care, it forces them to act in ways in accordance with the law and other ways, too.

Let me ask you this. There are some people I have seen who have the following theory of why Senate Democrats have not cut a deal where they give eight votes and move along. And that is that Chuck Schumer

is worried about a primary challenge from you and is worried about the politics to his left flank. And so because of that worry about a primary challenge,

he's going to shut down the government. Ergo, it is AOC's fault that the government is shutting down or that you're somehow the kind of fulcrum of this. And I want to just ask you straight up, like, are you planning

to primary challenge him? Do you think that's why he's doing this? This is so not about me in this moment. This is about people being able to insure their children. And I will say, because I saw some senators speculating about this, and I saw some Republican members of Congress saying, oh, well, if we have this shutdown, it's because of AOC. Well, if that's the case, my office is open, and you are free to walk in and negotiate with me directly, because what I'm not going to do is tolerate 4 million uninsured Americans because Donald Trump decided one day that he wants to just make sure that kids are dying

because they don't have access to insurance. That's what's not going to happen. And so, if those senators think that we're having a shutdown because of me, they're free to enter my office and negotiate, because what we're not going to do is allow all of millions of people in this country to not be able to afford their insulin and their chemotherapy.

So, come strike a deal with me, if that's what they really think is going on.

There is—over the last week, it seems a lot of people, and I include myself among them, feel like a sort of rising sense of alarm about the aggressiveness of the sort of authoritarian aspirations of this government, you know, firing, essentially firing a U.S. attorney to replace him with a patsy who will indict a political enemy. The, you know, the continued threat of using the military on American citizens, the ordering the troops to Portland and then backing up because it was five-year-old B-roll.

I don't know. Do you feel the same way over this last week or two? Does it feel like continuity to you? Are there conversations in your caucus about what this last week has meant?

I think there's two things that are happening at once, and this is something that's very important for people to understand. One, there absolutely is an unprecedented abuse of power, destruction of norms, erosion of our government and our democracy in order to prop up an authoritarian style of governance. That is happening. However, they are weaker than they look.

And it is important that we remember that, because what they rely on is the impression of power, the perception of inevitability, in us giving up in advance to say, oh, what's going to happen if I stand up, oh, what's going to happen if I stand up, et cetera? Nothing's going to happen. They rely on that perception of inevitability and power so that people comply in advance and acquiesce in advance

and give up in advance. And at the end of the day, Donald Trump is at record levels of unpopularity in his tenure. The Republican House is at record levels of unpopularity. They are underwater across the board, and they know it. And that is causing them to double down in public.

But it is backfiring. That is why, whether it's a shutdown, whether it's all of this, they want us to blink first. And we have too much to save. Protecting people is too important a task for us to give up before anything even starts. So they may want to send people in, but these National Guardsmen do not want to be turned against their fellow Americans.

We're seeing this here in Washington, D.C. It is an insult. Donald Trump is insulting the service members of this country by putting them on these silly tasks that they themselves do not want to be enforcing. And so, we have to understand that standing up matters, that our voice matters, to not give in to this cynicism, because that is what they rely on in order to perpetuate this

idea that they are—that they have total immunity from consequence. They will experience the consequences of this, but we have to be the consequence, which is why we have to stand tall right now, alongside everyday Americans who want us to be standing up right now as well.

I want to—the final question for you is about a ruling that came from a federal district judge who's been on the bench for decades and was appointed by Ronald Reagan. It's in the case of Ramea Ozturk and a few other individuals who's alleged that their free speech, First Amendment rights as protected by the Constitution, were violated by ICE grabbing them

because of things they said or wrote. And one of the things he gets to is the masking of ICE agents, which is something that we've seen in New York City, here in Chicago and around. He says, the court has listened carefully to the reason given

by Ozturk's captors for masking up. It rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable. ICE goes mass for a single reason, to terrorize Americans into quiescence. It's a federal judge appointed by Reagan.

In all our history, we've never tolerated an armed mass secret police carrying on in this fashion. ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it." Is it at all bracing to read a Reagan-appointed federal district judge write something like that in finding that Ramesa Ozturk's and others' rights were violated?

Of course. I mean, once you have—as you said, for a Reagan-appointed judge to be out and out talking about secret police in the United States of America in the year 2025 tells us everything about what's going on. And we get to these extremes through these small erosions and steps, when everyone says, makes an exception here or makes an exception there.

And then, before you know it, you have masked agents roaming the streets of this country that do not feel entitled to identify themselves or do not feel like as though they answer to the American people at all. That is dangerous. And it is not without saying—it does not go without saying that the people that they went after first are some of the most vulnerable activists in the United States, which is to

say pro-Palestinian organizers and young people, especially those who are on green cards or on visas. visas, and the idea that we would allow our freedom of speech to be violated and create exceptions to that for people who are advocating for the lives of Palestinians, it erodes at the very core of American identity, too, because this is a land of the free, but only as long as we defend it and make it so. And so we have a responsibility to ensure that these individuals are protected, including

Mahmoud Khalil, who the Trump administration is currently trying to move to deport.

Yes.

In fact, trying very, very hard as we speak. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, thank you for your time tonight. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, thank you for your time tonight.

I appreciate it. Of course. Thank you very much.