Liberal NY Paper Condemns AOC for Voting Down Small Biz Funding

It’s a rare day that The New York Daily News crosses the ideological divide to criticize a Democrat. The counterpart to the city’s conservative New York Post, the Daily News spent much of the 2016 election putting Donald Trump in clown makeup to draw attention to their pathetic headline stories. When you think “liberal rag,” the Daily News is among the first tabloids to come to mind.

So it was with some surprise that we read their latest editorial. Apparently, even devoted leftists can see that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is more interested in pandering to her socialist followers on Twitter than she is in serving the American people in Congress. And when she decided to vote against new funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, justifying her vote by saying that it “didn’t go far enough,” the Daily News Editorial Board took her to task for making “the wrong choice.”

“Debating the latest coronavirus aid package on the House floor Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said her parts of the Bronx and Queens comprise ‘the most impacted district in America.’ We’ll go further: She’s from the hardest-hit part of the hardest-hit city of the hardest-hit state in the hardest-hit country on Earth,” wrote the Editorial Board.

“So why was she one of just five members of Congress to vote against the $484 billion bill delivering boatloads of urgently needed help to small business, and to hospitals, and to ramp up testing?” asked the editors. “Her four comrades in arms were right-wing Republicans from far-less impacted districts down South or out West.”

In defending her vote, Ocasio-Cortez said: “My concern is that we are giving away the farm. I cannot go back to my communities and tell them to just wait for CARES four because we have now passed three, four pieces of legislation that’s related to coronavirus. And every time it’s the next one, the next one, the next one, and my constituents are dying.”

But the Daily News was not impressed with her reasoning.

“AOC claims it’s because the bill didn’t go far enough. Yeah: The first aid bill didn’t go far enough. Nor did the second. Nor did the third. The fourth didn’t get there either, but the response to crises happen in steps. If everyone said no to each massive package because it didn’t go all the way, we’d all be even deader in the water,” they argued. “Her terribly wrong vote made her the only Democrat in either the House or Senate siding against any of the four coronavirus bailouts passed since early March.

“Not the kind of distinction a rising star legislator should be proud of,” they concluded.

No, but then again, we’re not sure we could name anything AOC should actually be proud of. Maybe her supporters are finally beginning to see through the thin veil of her charisma…and coming to understand that there is precious little underneath.