The Radical Who Believes in Congress

It Belongs to You

Mara: "You know, this is our government. All of this belongs to us. It belongs to you." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The New Yorker magazine that her father said that when she was about five, at the Reflecting Pool in Washington, pointing toward the Capitol.

Eli: And the last words she remembers from him come in a hospital room, in the fall of 2008: "Hey, make me proud."

Mara: Two sentences from one father, as his daughter tells it. That daughter is now Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Bronx and Queens, and this year she's listed as running for reelection to the House.

Eli: She grew up in a Puerto Rican family in New York, with an architect father and a mother who cleaned houses. She's the congresswoman who once said "call me a radical," and who later told a committee she may be one of the very few people "that actually believes in Congress."

Mara: Those two lines sound like two different politicians. It's Thursday, September 24th, and today's angle is the radical who believes in Congress. We're asking what promise she is still trying to keep, through four moments in her own words: the Reflecting Pool, the hospital room, a phone call as she left Standing Rock, and one Capitol hearing room where she has spoken twice.

Eli: So start with the man at the water. Her father, Sergio, was an architect and a small-business owner.

Mara: And "it belongs to you," said to a five-year-old? To us, that sounds less like a civics lesson than a dare.

Eli: Before she started school, her parents made a bet on a different ZIP code. They thought the public schools around Parkchester, in the Bronx, weren't good enough, so with help from relatives they scraped together a down payment on a small house in Yorktown Heights, a prosperous suburb in Westchester County.

Mara: She graduated from Yorktown High School in 2007. And she says the forty-minute drives between there and the Bronx taught her how ZIP code determines destiny.

Eli: I'll admit, when you hear "Bronx" so often, the Westchester part raises an eyebrow.

Mara: Fair. Her answer is that the contrast was the lesson. Growing up alongside cousins her age, she described "feeling like we all had kind of different opportunities, depending on where we were physically located."

Eli: And there's a scene she later told Congress. "I grew up doing my homework on the stairs of other people's houses and on other people's kitchen tables and reading in other people's living rooms as my mother scrubbed toilets and swept floors to make sure that we had a better life."

Mara: Other people's, three times in one sentence.

Eli: Her father tells her the government belongs to her, and she's doing homework at a table that belongs to somebody else. Hold onto that table.

Make Me Proud

Mara: The second sentence, the one she remembers as his last words to her, is where the promise gets its other half. In the fall of 2008 she was in college, and she went to see her father in the hospital. "I didn't know that it was going to be the last time that I talked to my dad," she has said, "but toward the end of our interaction, I started to feel like it was."

Eli: And he said, as she recalls it, "Hey, make me proud." He died about a week later.

Mara: She told The New Yorker, "I took it very literally. My G.P.A. skyrocketed."

Eli: You can't fix the hospital, so you fix the transcript.

Mara: And under the grades, something heavier. "It felt like…I didn't just lose my dad," she has said, "I also lost myself."

Eli: So now there are two sentences to carry. One says the government is yours. The other can sound, in our reading, like a call to prove it. And the man she remembers saying both is gone.

Mara: What came next, she has a name for: "The crucible was the aftermath—moving back to the Bronx." Her mother took jobs cleaning houses and driving a school bus. The family went into debt, and the house was on the verge of foreclosure.

Eli: Her campaign biography mentions huge medical bills, too.

Mara: And he left no will. She has described a long legal fight over his estate, and says it taught her firsthand how court-appointed lawyers can profit off families struggling with the bureaucracy.

Eli: Then her twenties: about twenty-five thousand dollars in student loans, roughly three hundred dollars a month. And as a bartender, she says, she paid two hundred dollars a month for the "privilege" of a health plan with an eight-thousand-dollar deductible.

Mara: Which is why she's blunt about the Affordable Care Act: "The main reason why I feel comfortable saying that the ACA has failed is because it failed me and it failed everyone that I worked with in a restaurant."

Eli: Eight thousand dollars before the insurance really kicks in, on tips.

O.K., I'm Listening

Mara: The promise finds a vehicle almost by accident. In the fall of 2016, her brother asked if he could send in a nomination form for her to a new group recruiting candidates, called Brand New Congress. On a lark, she said O.K.

Eli: Her aside to The New Yorker: "But I was also working in a restaurant!"

Mara: A political career that starts with a sibling's paperwork and a shrug.

Eli: Then the drive. After organizing for Senator Bernie Sanders in the Bronx, she and a friend packed a twenty-year-old station wagon and drove across the country to Standing Rock, in North Dakota, where people were protesting a pipeline.

Mara: She calls it a turning point. She had thought running for office took wealth, influence and power. Then: "When I saw how people put everything they had on the line, not just for themselves but for others, I felt called to do more."

Eli: As she told The New Yorker, in late December 2016 one of Brand New Congress's lead organizers, Isra Allison, called her just as she was leaving the demonstration. "She told me what B.N.C. was about," she recalled. "I was just, like, 'O.K., I'm listening.'"

Mara: Eight years after "make me proud," she says yes.

Eli: She launched in May 2017 from the one-bedroom apartment she shared with her boyfriend, still working as a waitress and bartender. In 2018, she changed her shoes on the subway platform and pushed a granny cart full of fliers around the Bronx.

Mara: On Election Day, in the car to watch the returns, her advisers were reading hopeful reports off their phones. She shut it down: "Let's see the vote." She won.

The Price of Radical

Eli: Inside is where the promise first meets the limits. Days after she arrived, climate activists were occupying the office of her party's leader, Nancy Pelosi, and she went. "Oh my goodness, I could have thrown up that morning," she told CBS News. "I was so nervous."

Mara: CBS reported she was the only newly elected member who dropped by. She called on Pelosi to create a climate committee with no members who took fossil fuel money.

Eli: And Pelosi did create one. With limited powers, and no ban on members who took that money.

Mara: She won the argument and lost the details. Welcome to Congress.

Eli: In January 2019, on CBS's 60 Minutes, she said, "I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country." And: "if that's what radical means, call me a radical."

Mara: The label had a price. In her first three months, aides told TIME magazine, enough people threatened to kill her that Capitol Police trained her staff to assess visitors' risks.

Eli: Same person, same months.

Mara: Her own words, later: "There was a time where the volume of threats had gotten so high that I didn't even know if I was going to live to my next term."

One Room, Twice

Eli: The clearest place to see the promise she's keeping is one room: 2154, in the Rayburn House Office Building. On February 5, 2020, she testified there before a House subcommittee. "I am testifying today not only as a Member of Congress, but as a former child of a family in poverty and who has family that continues to live in poverty."

Mara: Her own description of her family. And those kitchen tables come back as policy: she argued the official poverty line assumes a spouse at home full-time with the kids, no significant health costs, and no difference in costs from place to place.

Eli: Her Recognizing Poverty Act, she said, would have federal agencies propose a line adjusted for family size and geography. And why the old one survives: "I believe that we do not want to recognize the level of poverty in the country because if we did, it would be a national scandal."

Mara: Her credo: "No person should be too poor to live." And she's argued that working full-time, even two full-time jobs, without enough for your kids or without health care, is not dignified.

Eli: Now the hard arithmetic. The Recognizing Poverty Act, H.R. 5069, was introduced on November 13, 2019, and referred to the House Committee on Education and Labor. Introduced is not enacted.

Mara: And the resolution she's best known for, the Green New Deal, never received a House floor vote.

Eli: Her campaign points elsewhere. It says she helped cap insulin at thirty-five dollars a month and out-of-pocket costs at two thousand dollars a year for people on Medicare, and brought twenty-two million federal dollars to community projects in the Bronx and Queens.

Mara: So: wins her campaign counts, and the signature ideas still on paper.

Eli: Then, January 10, 2024, same room, a House Oversight Committee meeting. She said: "Now, I may be one of the very few people that actually believes in Congress, you know, in this country, but I do, and many of us do here."

Mara: From the woman who said "call me a radical." And she went further: "I believe in the power of the Oversight Committee. Frankly, I believe in it, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats have the Chair."

Eli: If the building belongs to you, you don't burn it down. You demand it work.

From Inside the Building

Mara: So what promise is she still trying to keep? Picture the girl at the water, told it all belongs to her. Then the woman in room 2154, with everything between: other people's kitchen tables, a house nearly lost, a committee with limited powers, a poverty bill introduced, a resolution with no floor vote.

Eli: And her name, listed by the political group Justice Democrats as running this year for the House in New York's fourteenth district. Put together, the way she tells it, her father's sentence and her defense of Congress sound like one promise, pursued from inside the building.

Mara: Which makes "call me a radical" and believing in Congress the same sentence. And it leaves a question for anyone listening: what would it take for "it belongs to you" to be true for your own family?

Eli: He said it pointing at the Capitol. She's still saying it from inside. "It belongs to you."

Mara: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is someone worth keeping up with, so whatever comes next lands with the whole backstory.

Eli: And dig into politics more broadly. We have more episodes there, so you'll be ready when news breaks.

Mara: That's our story for today. I'm Mara.

Eli: And I'm Eli. Thanks for listening to Angle, and until next time.