https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-house-discipline-11562886550
Having spent so long defaming conservatives as racists, progressives can’t stop turning the accusation on each other. Two weeks ago Democratic presidential contenders all but called Joe Biden a segregationist. This week Nancy Pelosi got a taste of her party’s poison.
The House Speaker has lately criticized some of the most extreme progressives in her caucus for cultivating their own celebrity status at the expense of the party. Mrs. Pelosi had four of her caucus’s freshmen especially in mind: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
The four—in addition to trumpeting socialist measures, flirting with anti-Semitism and using Twitter to criticize moderates in their own party—voted against last month’s emergency spending bill for the southern border. They did so even though three of them have compared what’s happening at the border to the Holocaust. Mrs. Pelosi told the New York Times that these Members “have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
That inspired a few testy remarks from the four. “The public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez explained in a tweet. Which in turn prompted a rebuke from the Speaker: “You got a complaint?” she reportedly said to Democratic colleagues in a closed-door meeting on Wednesday. “You come and talk to me about it. But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just OK.”
With that, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez decided to resort to her default defense. This “persistent singling out,” she told the Washington Post, has reached “a point where it was just outright disrespectful . . . the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”
