Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took Rep Lauren Boebert to task for accusing her of avoiding town halls and selling her constituents out “at every turn”.
On Wednesday, video footage from a town hall held by the New York congresswoman went viral after it showcased two protesters skewering the Democrat for her support of Ukraine.
“Congresswoman, none of this matters unless there’s a nuclear war which you voted to send arms and weapons to Ukraine,” shouted one of the protesters of Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s support for Kyiv, before mentioning their support for former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.
The video was quickly picked up by right-wing Twitter accounts and regurgitated in right-wing media circles, such as Fox News, where it was rebroadcast to cast Ms Ocasio-Cortez as being a “war hawk” and unreliable to her voters.
“But now, all of a sudden, she wants to arm Ukraine to the teeth to start a war,” said Fox News host Jesse Waters while sharing a clip of the viral town hall from Wednesday night.
Rep Lauren Boebert, a staunch Republican of Colorado, picked up on the opportunity to slam Ms Ocasio-Cortez by tweeting the clip with the caption: “On the rare occasions that @AOC actually spends time with her constituents, she is reminded that she has sold them out at every turn. She campaigned as an outsider and has now just morphed into #SandyPelosi!”
Ms Ocasio-Cortez swiftly hit back by listing ways in which she is different from Ms Boebert, who has received her own fair share of backlash from critics who say she is more focused on her own celebrity than taking public meetings with the people who voted her into power.
“Hey Boebert, you seem to have us confused,” she wrote. “I have attended & hosted 100s of community events, hold regular town halls don’t take a dime in corporate cash,” she began, adding an emoji “checkmark” for every bulleted point.
“You: are bankrolled by corporate PACs, Big Ag, & Oil, are too scared to hold regular town halls open to all,” she listed in the latter half of the tweet, adding a “throwing out the trash” emoji for each counterpoint.
Ms Boebert, a far-right gun advocate who attempted to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election and remains a strong election denier, has indeed benefitted from the oil and gas sector.
Early in the freshman congresswoman’s tenure in 2021, it was revealed through a financial disclosure filing that her husband, Jayson Boebert, raked in nearly half a million dollars working for an energy firm called Terra Energy Productions in 2020. For 2021, he was on track, it was reported by the Associated Press, to pull in another $768,000.
These disclosures were not made public until after Rep Boebert’s successful congressional campaign and were also not made public when she was pushing for looser regulations on oil and gas drilling as a member of the House Natural Resources Committee.
Both Ms Ocasio-Cortez and Ms Boebert are running for reelection in the upcoming midterms, and both candidates are projected by FiveThirtyEight to have a strong favourability in keeping their seats.
