Joining me now is House Democratic candidate and rising progressive star, pardon me, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her mother is from Puerto Rico and she had family in Puerto Rico during the hurricane. Alexandria, thanks so much for joining us.
The president continuing to send these tweets disputing the official government death toll from Hurricane Maria and blaming Democrats for inventing those numbers. I know this is personal for you. You tweeted that your grandfather died in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the storm. I'm so sorry for your loss. Can you tell us what happened?
Well, I think what happened in my family is what happened to thousands of Puerto Ricans, where in the neglect and government inaction, there was so little response, so little connection. You don't know whether a hospital lost power. My grandfather was in a medical facility and he had passed away in the middle of the night.
The people who pass away in these storms are the most vulnerable. They are children with illnesses. They are elderly.
And when power is not restored, when infrastructure is not taken seriously, these are the first people who pass away in storms. And what we saw in Puerto Rico was a mass death of 3,000 people. It was the worst humanitarian crisis in modern American history.
And many, many people impacted by this storm point to government inaction as the cause of death. Now the Trump administration will respond to comments like the one you just made by saying that FEMA was on the ground, they were doing as much as they could, the infrastructure on the island was already badly damaged because of years, if not decades of neglect by politicians in Puerto Rico and the United States. What did you make of the president's tweets?
Well, I think first and foremost, there is a systemic issue here, and that is the modern-day colonial relationship that the United States has with Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans are technically American citizens, but they do not have the right to vote. They are treated in completely different ways as normal American citizens are. And for that reason, you do have the chronic neglect of the island. And it is acute situations like this, in which Puerto Ricans continue to be treated like second-class citizens.
Puerto Rico was given a fraction of the FEMA recovery. as other as Houston, for example, and Hurricane Harvey. We have Hurricane Irma.
We have Hurricane Sandy. And this is not just an issue of the colonial status of Puerto Rico, but it's also an issue of us not treating and dedicating enough resources to addressing climate change enough either. And when you say they don't have the right to vote, you mean they don't have the right to vote for members of the House that can vote on the floor and they don't have two senators because obviously they have the right to vote.
I mean, the Puerto Ricans have no. right to vote in federal elections. They cannot choose a president. They do not have a vote in, they don't have a representative vote in the House or the Senate, which means that they did not even have the capacity to choose for this president, yet they continue to suffer at the hands of this administration.
So I want to move on. You endorsed progressive candidate Cynthia Nixon in the Democratic primary for governor of New York. She lost on Thursday to Governor Andrew Cuomo by a whopping 31 points.
Now, I know progressive candidates have had plenty of other victories, including yours. But Governor Cuomo said that your progressive wave was, quote, not even a ripple. He called your primary win a, quote, fluke.
And he asked on Friday, quote, where was that effect yesterday? What's your response to Governor Cuomo? Well, I mean, I always take a you know, I'm always down to go toe to toe sometimes. But I think what's what when you actually look at the numbers that we focused on, every single down ballot progressive candidate in my district, New York 14, one.
New York had a profound. title change really in the Democratic Party. One out of every five Democratic senators got replaced on Thursday night.
And the path to eliminating the IDC was through New York 14 in my district. So I'm proud to say that every single locally endorsed candidate that we mobilized for won our election. Cynthia Nixon did a phenomenal job. She lost your district by 30 points.
Right, right. But we focused on our local Kansas and we focused on the legislatures. But, you know, I think that what she did was that she centered a lot of phenomenal issues. She centered racial justice.
She centered criminal justice reform. She centered the legalization of marijuana, single payer health care. And a lot of down ballot candidates benefited from that.
And what I also look forward to moving forward is us rallying behind all Democratic nominees, including the governor, to make sure that he wins in November. Your platform has called for various new programs, including Medicare for All, Housing as a Federal Right, a federal jobs guarantee, tuition-free public college, canceling all student loan debt. According to nonpartisan and left-leaning studies friendly to your cause, including the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities or the Tax Policy Center, the overall Price tag is more than $40 trillion in the next decade.
You recently said in an interview that increasing taxes on the very wealthy plus an increased corporate tax rate would make $2 trillion over the next 10 years. So where is the other $38 trillion going to come from? Well, one of the things that we need to realize when we look at something like Medicare for All, Medicare for All would save the American people a very large amount of money. And what we see as well is that these systems are not just pie in the sky.
They are... Many of them are accomplished by every modern, civilized democracy in the Western world. The United Kingdom has a form of single-payer health care. Canada, France, Germany.
What we need to realize is that these investments are better and they are good for our future. These are generational investments, so that not just—they're not short-term Band-Aids, but they are really profound decisions about who we want to be as a nation and how we want to act. as the wealthiest nation in the history of the world.
Right, now I get that, but the price tag for everything that you've laid out in your campaign is $40 trillion over the next 10 years. I understand that Medicare for All would cost more to some wealthier people and to the government and to taxpayers while also reducing individual health care expenditures. But I'm talking about the overall package.
You say it's not pie in the sky, but $40 trillion is quite a bit of money. And the taxes that you talked about raising to pay for this, to pay for your agenda, only count for two. And we're going by left-leaning analysts.
Right. Well, when you look again at, again, how our health care works, currently we pay much of these costs go into the private sector. So what we see is, for example, you know, a year ago I was working downtown in a restaurant. I went around and I asked how many of you folks have health insurance.
Not a single person did. because these they were paying they would have had to pay two hundred dollars a month uh for for a payment for insurance that had an eight thousand dollar deductible what these represent are lower costs overall for these programs and additionally what this is is a broader agenda we do know and we acknowledge that there are political realities they don't always happen with just the wave of a wand but we can work to make these things happen And in fact, when you look at the economic activity that it spurs, for example, if you look at my generation, millennials, the amount of economic activity that we do not engage in, the fact that we delay purchasing homes, that we don't participate in the economy and purchasing cars, et cetera, as fully as possible, is a cost. It is an externality, if you will, of unprecedented amounts of student loan debt. I'm assuming I'm not going to get an answer for the other $38 trillion, but we'll have you back and maybe we can go over that. But I do want to ask you about some breaking news here because you've been a major supporter of the MeToo movement.
You have also expressed the need for caution in the past. You said, quote, we also need to make sure that due process is held. There's this new accusation this week from an anonymous woman about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh from an incident more than 35 years ago.
It was leaked to the press by Democrats. Do you think Brett Kavanaugh deserves the benefit of the doubt here? I think that I believe, well, first of all, Brett Kavanaugh should not be confirmed to the Supreme Court under any circumstances, whether regardless and independent.
What about this? What about this case on this case with this anonymous accusation? Well, I certainly think that one of the aspects of due process is that we have to hear these things out and he should certainly not be confirmed before this is explored. So you think that, do you think an anonymous accusation is enough?
What if the woman decides that she does not want to come forward? There are a lot of people who think that the kind of due process you've called for has not happened here. This was not raised in the public confirmation. hearing.
It was not raised in the written requests for comment. It was not raised in the private closed session. There is a way, a process for this to happen. The Democrats had this information in July, but it didn't come out until a few days ago. Yeah, again, I think that really when we talk about process and due process and justice, it must center on the victim.
I cannot say whether what should be done and what should not be done, because what we need to make sure is that there is due justice for the victim in this case. A lot of that depends on if she wants to come forward, if she chooses to remain anonymous. Or frankly, When it comes to behaviors like sexual assault, it's about power.
And often when it comes to behaviors of sexual assault, they are not one-off incidents. They are repeated. So perhaps this woman chooses to remain anonymous, but if her account is true, there could potentially be other victims out there that are scared to come forward, and this could potentially be an act of solidarity for them to air that out if they exist.
But does the accused deserve any due process as well? Well, due process is about justice for all folks involved. And when we have a lack of process, then we have a lack of justice for both victims and the accused. But what is going on right now is that there is not due process, and we're looking at brushing a potentially and extremely concerning incident under the rug, which should not be occurring, especially when it comes to a Supreme Court nomination in which the Republican Party has...
already demonstrated that they will not disclose or they will not really unseal a lot of the documents, which they frankly demanded of Democratic nominees for the Supreme Court. They wanted to make sure that, I mean, look at what they put Merrick Garland through. Look at what they put Sonia Sotomayor through. Yet they want to kind of hide almost everything about Brett Kavanaugh's history. And so I think that what this is, is that this is part of a pattern.
And it's a pattern of keeping this nominee in the dark ahead of his nomination. All right, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, thank you so much for being with us. We appreciate it.