WATCH: Rep. Oscasio-Cortez questions Michael Cohen about President Trump's taxes. pic.twitter.com/1oWTcqbSmy
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) February 27, 2019
If you have less than 5 minutes and missed this yesterday, watch AOC’s devastating line of questioning with Cohen. First, she avoids wasting her time bloviating. What a refreshing change. Second, she gets Cohen on the record listing people the committee should follow up with to validate his claims. The Republicans claim Cohen is a liar – let’s get some witnesses in who can back up his claims. Third, she picked a Trump property in or near her district, that probably benefited from a fraudulent tax claim, as an example.
Being an average Member of Congress is an “almost famous” job – there are very few of you, people will be impressed if they know, but you’re not going to get recognized on the street. But there’s one place where a MoC is king or queen – the local party hierarchy. If you’re a member of the local party who wants to be the next MoC from your district, you’ve been marinating in the behavior of your current MoC. They run their jaw at hearings, they are often abusive or at least nasty to underlings, and they are so often the recipient of frequent and fond ass kissing that they forget that, outside of the bubble, a lot of people think they’re full of shit. They also desperately want to transcend their almost famous status, so they use their 5 minutes of committee time to grandstand in the hope that their bon mots will be picked up on cable TV.
AOC came up outside the bubble. She, like most of the rest of us, understands that the masturbatory grandstanding that predominates in committee questioning disgusts people outside the bubble. So, when she has 5 minutes at arguably one of the most important committee hearings in recent memory, she digs in, does her job, and yields back part of her time.