Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasts Biden over 'lurch to the Right': 'It's quite dangerous'

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized President Biden over a "lurch to the right" after he approved a massive oil drilling project, saying it was a "profound miscalculation" and "quite dangerous." 

Jacobin, a socialist political magazine, interviewed Ocasio-Cortez in April and asked her about Biden's approval of the Willow Project, a 30-year oil drilling project in Alaska, and whether he should be challenged in a Democratic primary. 

"This lurch to the right at a time when the Right is scrambling and lost in the desert on how to even win an election after these stunning losses — I think it’s a profound miscalculation. And it is quite dangerous," Ocasio-Cortez said.

The New York lawmaker also seemed to warn the president against forgetting "who it was that put him over the top" and added that some of the Biden administration's latest moves were "highly concerning." 

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She also predicted that the president's recent dip in approval was due to the oil project. 

The magazine asked Ocasio-Cortez how she plans hold the Democratic establishment accountable when "progressives in the Congress are oftentimes voting for what the party leadership wants" and rarely holding out their votes. 

"I want to emphasize that there are times where we do break with the party, for example, on Build Back Better. That was a yearlong war we had inside our party," she responded. 

She described a phone call with the president, during which, according to Ocasio-Cortez, Biden asked her and other progressives to vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill and told them to "trust" that he would get the Build Back Better bill passed. 

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"The framing here, to give a window into how the internal politics and party works is, ‘Do you trust us or not? Do you trust this leadership?’ This is Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the president of United States, the vice president, members of the cabinet. They use a collective environment; this is not a private conversation," she said.

"It’s almost like an invitation, to try to say in front of everybody and to stand up to the Speaker and to the president and say, ‘This is not a matter of trust at all. This is a matter of votes. And it’s not that I don’t trust you — it’s that I don’t trust Joe Manchin. And I don’t know if I trust anybody to be able to bring consistency out of a person who does not have any,’" she continued. 

Ocasio-Cortez, joined by Reps. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., Jared Huffman, D-Calif., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., issued a statement criticizing Biden's approval of the Willow Project. 

"The Biden administration has committed to fighting climate change and advancing environmental justice—today’s decision to approve the Willow project fails to live up to those promises," the statement said. "Their decision ignores ... the irrefutable science that says we must stop building projects like this to slow the ever more devastating impacts of climate change."

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Ocasio-Cortez also criticized the president on immigration. 

"I’m a major critic of the party. I think the Biden administration has been very disappointing on climate. In the first twenty-five months of the Trump presidency versus the first twenty-five months of the Biden presidency, Biden has authorized more fossil fuel permits. This is a serious issue. The Biden administration is failing on immigration as well, but that’s a separate conversation," she told the socialist political magazine.