We can be whatever we have the courage to see.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
On July 11th, 2024, I celebrated my nineteenth birthday in Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Washington, DC office. I stood awkwardly within a circle as the Chief of Staff, Legislative Director, and the Congresswoman herself sang a cacophonous rendition of Happy Birthday.
Three months prior during my freshman year, I opened an offer to work for AOC’s Legislative Team over the summer. She had long been my greatest role model, going back to 8th grade when I watched a 2019 video titled A Message From the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which envisioned the year 2030 after a decade of the Green New Deal’s vision for decarbonization through socioeconomic dignity. A single sentiment still rings in my memory. We need to do this. In the years to come I became wholly immersed as a political organizer in the climate movement, bringing me from the Sunrise Movement’s National Team, to two Presidential and four Congressional campaigns, and to the DNC Climate Council itself, where I became the first-ever appointee with Green New Deal in my title. I am not religious, but I spent my teenage years living, breathing, and praying for House Resolution 109 from the 116th Congress.
By 2024, the Congresswoman had become much more than DC’s precocious Green New Dealer – she emerged as a cultural giant representing youth, disruption, and a fiery brand of Modern Progressivism. The weight of her voice transcended the original chosen focus of climate, expanding to healthcare, economics, democracy, and any pertinent matter of normative ethics. With the largest Twitter and Instagram following of any member of the House of Representatives and deep prominence through media attention, the term “AOC” constituted a paradigm-shifting philosophy of governance. To me, though, her DC office was still the heart of the Green New Deal movement. I viewed my offer as an obligation to build a livable future.
I was thrust into the quagmire of Congress upon arrival and pushed to think in new dimensions entirely. By my flight to Chicago for the 2024 Democratic National Convention in August, I carried a new ontology of political morality.
Legislative Political Imagination
My immediate boss, the office’s Legislative Director, assigned me as a liaison between AOC and the Climate and Community Institute, a policy think tank bringing the Green New Deal to life in climate and economic legislative proposals. Even after the passage of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable energy subsidies, the market led energy transition was failing to drive enough investment towards offshore wind to meet decarbonization goals. We had seen several East Coast offshore wind projects canceled due to under coordinated buildout of our domestic supply chain – a fatal shortcoming for a highly capital intensive endeavor susceptible to economic shocks. Yet, we couldn’t shrug our shoulders simply because the market was inadequate. Drawing inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s public works programs of the 1930s, we wrote a research memo proposing a sweeping solution: creating a federal public offshore wind development authority mandated to ambitiously and responsibly scale the industry towards climate goals. This authority would coordinate regional manufacturing hubs to supplement the supply chain, spur innovation, and create good union jobs. This wasn’t only a policy proposal; it was political imagination. One day, I hope we can introduce and pass a Congressional bill modeled off our proposal and make this wind authority reality. Ideas can transform entire nations if we have the courage to write them into law.
Building Progressive Community
In late June, I organized and held the first-ever Progressive Hilltern Briefing in Rayburn House Office Room 2168. We brought together over 100 Congressional interns even though there were only had 90 chairs. I invited a roster of youth movement organizers to give workshops on the Green New Deal, Equal Rights Amendment, humane foreign policy, economic populism, digital organizing, and how members of Congress can co-govern with young people. I wasn’t even sure I was allowed to use my House email to book a Congressional room to do something so overtly political, but the team handed me the baton and told me to make some good trouble.
The briefing carried force beyond original intent. We partnered with and featured someone from the Progressive Talent Pipeline, an organization that helps progressive young people land jobs in Congress. The room folded into an 80-person group chat from which we organized hangouts and political campaigns. Often, idealistic college students work one Congressional internship only to feel so disillusioned that they disavow politics forever. They expect to write a bill that solves a crisis, and are instead relegated to answering phones and giving Capitol tours. We rejected this path and built meaning into a bureaucratic summer. I hosted a party called Champagne Socialism where interns in Senator Bernie Sanders’ and House Squad offices converged to scheme the future of the left. We recruited interns into organizing for former Representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush’s primary elections campaigns to defend progressive Congressional power. To win a better future for the long haul, we had to first build a political community rooted in solidarity and camaraderie. Like how AOC took the Green New Deal movement from policy to people.
Principle Through Resistance
On July 10th, the office filed Articles of Impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, exposing a pattern of undisclosed gifts, conflicts of interest, and refusals to recuse. It was my first glimpse of how fragile our constitutional democracy can be. As news spread throughout the House that AOC was filing the articles, I was responsible for tracking the members of Congress who signed onto the articles as original co-sponsors and submitting the forms of notice to the House Clerk’s Office for processing to Congress.gov. Despite the recent exposure of blatant, egregious misconduct from Alito and Thomas, only 17 members of Congress found the courage to sign on as original supporters – under 4%. It raised a difficult question that we had to answer. What is the point of political resistance through Congressional resolutions, bills, and articles that will never reach 218 House votes, 60 in the Senate, and become law?
I got my answer in the week that followed. Even the attempt stirred shockwaves in national politics. Right away, the New York Times ran a piece about the articles. The next day, our office had over 3000 voicemails from Americans all around the country thanking AOC for standing up against the Supreme Court’s corruption. The articles became one building block in the groundwork for a national anti-corruption, anti-oligarchy movement that has involved tens of millions of Americans and flourished in the year since. Perhaps the Supreme Court’s composition will not change for decades. But the task of striving for a more just democracy must be born out of principle, not the pragmatism of legislative majorities. All resistance starts with conviction.
That, I learned, is political morality.