Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said Tuesday that she was refusing to attend the first address to Congress of President Donald Trump’s second term.
Instead, the far-left firebrand congresswoman is going to livestream the event on social media.
‘None of this is normal, and I will not legitimize it.’
“I’m not going to the Joint Address. I will be live posting and chatting with you all here instead. Then going on IG Live after,” she wrote on the BlueSky platform.
She went on to claim that she was hearing Republican were filling seats on the Democrat side of the House floor in order to make it look like Trump was getting applause from that side.
“There are general seating areas for each body (House, Senate, SCOTUS,etc) but there are honored seats for each party’s leadership and they’re even trying to squat those,” she added. “If it doesn’t sort out, be aware you may see applause on both sides of the aisle but they may be GOP.”
This is not the first time she has tried to hijack a presidential address to Congress to garner attention. In 2019, she invited as a guest to the State of the Union a woman who went viral for screaming at former Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake over his support for confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2020, Ocasio-Cortez also boycotted the speech and claimed she was avoiding “normalizing” the president’s actions.
“After much deliberation, I have decided that I will not use my presence at a state ceremony to normalize Trump’s lawless conduct & subversion of the Constitution,” she said on social media. “None of this is normal, and I will not legitimize it.”
Trump will likely be very energized for the speech after across-the-board victories for Republicans in the 2024 elections. The GOP has regained control of the Senate, maintained control of the House of Representatives, and taken over the Oval Office.
The president is likely to tout the dozens of executive orders he has issued since returning to office to dismantle the apparatus of the administrative state. Democrats and other left-wing groups have challenged these orders in court, with mixed results.
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