Hawley and Cruz encouraged the January 6th riot.
That riot put AOC and other Congresspeople and staff’s life at risk. They were lucky to escape. We know that one rioter was texted that Congress had fled to the basement and that he was to turn on the gas and kill them.
It was a coup attempt. Because Trump is incompetent and tends to hire incompetents (with a few rare exceptions), the coup failed. The army wasn’t onside, only a few cops were willing to help, and so on. The best the coupsters could do is make sure that the outnumbered cops weren’t reinforced by more police or by the national guard.
Anyway, if AOC had been caught by the crowd, the best she could hope for was a beating. The crowd wanted to kill Pence, their own VP, as a traitor and AOC has been far more vilified than that. A beating would be the best case, death after some horrible abuse is the more likely case.
So AOC is right, and since she understands, correctly, that Hawley and Cruz and some others were part of making the riot/coup happen, she doesn’t want to work with them. After all, they did something that could easily have gotten her beaten, raped and/or dead.
It is also true that since there have been no consequences for those who aided, planned and abetted the coup attempt, just for the suckers they used, so there may be another one in the future. She is correct about that also.
What is not true is that this is particularly new: my judgment is that Bush Jr. could have pulled off a successful coup, he just chose not to. He would have had the military onside, and while he was personally suffering from some sort of brain damage, he had many subordinates who were, in their own narrow ways, competent. They knew how the bureaucracy and power works, and were brilliant at making it do what they wanted. The 2000 election was unquestionably stolen, and that was a coup without the theatrics.
America’s met the social conditions for coups for some time now.
In the present, however, it is also true that Cruz and Hawley; Hawley in particular, remain possible votes for things that AOC will want passed. Hawley pushed $2,000 checks hard.
Some of what Hawley wants done will help AOC’s constituents avoid poverty or death. This is a conundrum, and it is best answered by accepting their votes but not letting them take lead if at all possible. Hawley wants to be President, and AOC doesn’t want a man complicit in a riot/coup that could have killed her to have that sort of power. This is reasonable.
What happened January 6th was serious. It is not best answered the way that our political elites are answering it, with an increased security state which will not work when the threat is, as the horror movie line runs, “inside the house.”
But those who are mocking AOC for her fear and for her determination to not work with those who encouraged Jan 6th are missing the actual danger she was in. The protestors beat a cop to death, who they had nothing personally against. They’ve been indoctrinated to hate AOC.
And AOC is right that people who face no consequences for a coup, may well try again if they see no other way to get what they want.
But the problem is too far gone. The correct response is to expel those members and Senators involved, but since Congress operates on an entirely partisan basis, with no actual institutional or democratic loyalty, that is not possible.
This is part of why I say the US is in a pre-coup state: that the conditions are met. The responses required to remove the conditions are not possible.
In the meantime, there is a crisis, and it will be used, as all crises are, to do what those who actually have power wanted before anything happened: crack down on the internet, increase police state powers and so on.
And the abuse of the population, by both parties, will continue, until an elite faction does manage a coup, using the resentment that Democrats and Republicans have built and earned over the years as fuel, OR until America finds a way to be good to the majority of its population.
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