Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) shut down an audience member who called a former GOP lawmaker a “moron” at an MSNBC town hall on Friday.
Ocasio-Cortez appeared alongside former GOP Rep. Bob Inglis (S.C.) on the network for a panel discussion about her proposed Green New Deal and other progressive issues.
During one portion of the town hall, Inglis, who has said he believes in climate change, expressed concerns about having “the mirror image of a Trump rally on climate change.”
“I worry that what we do is if we have basically the mirror image of a Trump rally on climate change, that we drive all the people away that could come our way and solve this thing now,” he said, prompting an audible reaction from the audience.
Inglis, who left in the House in 2011, suggested that Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives focus solely on climate change now before coming back to address other issues such as health care and universal basic income.{mosads}
“You can’t do it in a single Congress, the entire Green New Deal,” he said. “It is literally impossible with the number of committee references that you would have in the course of that.”
“Is it possible that we say, climate change … we’ve got to act now?” he said. “Can we come back maybe to universal basic income a little bit later?”
Some audience members loudly booed Inglis, with one person calling him a “moron.”
“Hey! That’s unacceptable,” Ocasio-Cortez responded to the audience member before turning to Inglis and adding, “That’s the difference between me and Trump.”
She later shared the clip on Twitter, writing, “Let’s debate, not debase.”
Some Republicans have compared Ocasio-Cortez to President Trump because of her social media use and habit of responding directly to the press and her critics, comparisons that she and her allies have deemed “absurd.”
The MSNBC town hall comes after the Senate blocked the Green New Deal in a vote this week that saw most Democrats voting present. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) forced a vote on the proposal in an effort to test Democrats’ unity on the topic.
But at the MSNBC event on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez outlined her plans to push forward with a sweeping effort to address climate change through legislation.
“I didn’t expect them to make total fools of themselves,” she said of GOP critics of the plan, which she maintains is not socialist or radical.
Updated: 10:10 p.m.