The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has responded to a report that a Republican colleague accosted her on the steps of the US Capitol on Monday.
The Hill reported that Ocasio-Cortez was confronted by the Florida Republican congressman Ted Yoho, who did not like her recent comments about the connection between poverty and crime.
According to the Hill, Yoho said Ocasio-Cortez was “disgusting” for saying of spiking gun violence in New York this month that “crime is a problem of a diseased society, which neglects its marginalized people … policing is not the solution to crime”.
Yoho reportedly told Ocasio-Cortez: “You are out of your freaking mind.”
Ocasio-Cortez responded by saying Yoho was being “rude”.
After the pair parted, Yoho was overheard to say: “Fucking bitch.”
Ocasio-Cortez reflected on the tense exchange on Tuesday morning, writing in a tweet: “I never spoke to [Representative] Yoho before he decided to accost me on the steps of the nation’s Capitol yesterday.
“Believe it or not, I usually get along fine with my GOP colleagues. We know how to check our legislative sparring at the committee door.”
The progressive congresswoman closed the tweet by cheekily adding: “But hey, ‘bitches’ get stuff done.”
The exchange – and Ocasio-Cortez’s questioning of other Republicans who claimed not to have seen it – carried echoes of a confrontation on the Senate floor in 2017, between Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell and Elizabeth Warren.
During debate over Donald Trump’s nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, McConnell barred Warren from reading a letter by Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, which criticized Sessions’ record as a judge in Alabama.
“Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech,” he said. “She had appeared to violate the rule [against impugning the character of other senators, as Sessions was then].
“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Warren supporters quickly turned “she persisted” into a slogan, hashtag and meme.
