Maybe she can quit bitching about Republicans long enough to look at her own party.
“It is unjust for Congress to budget a living wage for ourselves, yet rely on unpaid interns & underpaid overworked staff just bc Republicans want to make a statement about ‘fiscal responsibility,’” Ocasio-Cortez added. “If that’s the case, they can cut down on staff to pay them well. Or raise the MRA.”
Most Capitol Hill interns are not paid for their work. According to a 2017 study by the non-profit Pay Our Interns, only 6 percent percent of House offices paid their interns. The same report found that a higher percentage of Republicans in the Senate were compensating their interns. Fifty-one percent of Republican senators and 31 percent of Democratic senators paid their interns.
I think she is going to be singing a different tune when she has to start budgeting her own staff salaries.
She is free to use her Members’ Representational Allowance to pay her staff however she chooses. She has the ability to put her money where her mouth is on this one.
No. She criticized the republicans – who have had the majority for two years – not appropriating the funds while talking about “fiscal responsibility.” She did not single out republican interns.
Here’s a thought. The intern para was to show that for all her criticizing of the Republicans, more of them pay their interns than Dems do. That was used as an illustration of her stupidity on this subject, not what the entire article is about.
You are the one throwing that out there as if it really means something just because you need to support her on an issue she really doesn’t seem to understand.
She wants her staffers to have a “living wage”? There is nothing stopping her from using her allowance to do so.
So now you’re arguing the article is about interns and their pay? That’s not what she is arguing at all.
She doesn’t get to decide what other Congressmen pay their staffers, just her own. She has the perfect set up to walk the talk.
Chances are she will not. She will use the excuse that the mean Republicans wouldn’t increase the MRA therefore she can’t pay her staffers more, when the reality is she can pay them whatever she wishes within her allowance. She could take her own advice and cut her staff in order to pay the others more, but I’m thinking she will not.
Is this one of those supposed “gotcha” moments where you go on to say that she doesn’t say “all interns everywhere” even though we are only talking about interns on the hill? Wow, that was so clever.
We are not only talking about interns on the hill or even everywhere. That is not what is talked about in the article, at all.
This isn’t a “supposed gotcha moment”, this is a moment that shows you aren’t even in the ballpark on what the article is discussing because you were so intent on getting a dig in that you really didn’t take the time to understand what she was talking about.