- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for refusing to condemn Rep. Paul Gosar over a violent anime video he shared.
- "What is so hard about saying that this is wrong?" Ocasio-Cortez asked.
- McCarthy denounced a vote to censure Gosar as the "definition of abuse of power."
WASHINGTON, DC — Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on Wednesday excoriated House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for defending GOP Rep. Paul Gosar as the lower chamber debated a resolution to censure the Arizona Republican and strip him of his committee assignments.
The issue concerns a video Gosar shared on Twitter last week that was edited to depict him as an anime character killing Ocasio-Cortez and swinging swords at President Joe Biden.
Rather than condemning Gosar over the video, McCarthy said the move to censure him was the "definition of abuse of power." The Republican leader suggested that the censure vote would set a precedent allowing the GOP to kick Democrats off of committees if the party regained a majority in the House in the 2022 midterm elections.
"It means that under the Pelosi precedent, all of the members I have mentioned will need approval of the majority to keep those positions in the future," McCarthy said.
Ocasio-Cortez said that the censure vote was "not as complex" as McCarthy "would like to make folks believe."
"It's pretty cut and dry," she said. "Does anyone in this chamber find this behavior acceptable?"
The New York Democrat said it's a "sad day in which a member who leads a political party ... cannot bring themselves to say that issuing a depiction of murdering a member of Congress is wrong."
"What is so hard about saying that this is wrong?" Ocasio-Cortez asked, adding, "This is not about me. This is not about Rep. Gosar. But this is about what we are willing to accept."
—CSPAN (@cspan) November 17, 2021
The comments came ahead of a Wednesday vote to censure Gosar after he posted the video on November 7. The clip was an edited version of the opening credits of a Japanese animated series called "Attack on Titan." Gosar's face is superimposed on a character that kills another character with Ocasio-Cortez's face on it, and swings two swords at a character superimposed with Biden's face. The tweet was captioned: "Any anime fans out there?"
Amid the backlash, Gosar took the tweet down on November 9. He has since tried to explain that the tweet was not meant as a threat against Ocasio-Cortez or Biden and was meant to be "symbolic" of the GOP's fight against the Democratic Party's immigration policy.
"The cartoon depicts the symbolic nature of a battle between lawful and unlawful policies and in no way intended to be a targeted attack against Representative Cortez or Mr. Biden," Gosar said in a November 9 statement, in which he misspelled Ocasio-Cortez's last name.
Democrats have denounced Gosar's tweet, claiming that the video glorifies violence against his colleague and the president.
"When we incite violence with depictions against our colleagues, that trickles down into violence in this country," Ocasio-Cortez said during remarks on the House floor on Wednesday. "That is where we must draw the line, independent of party, identity or belief."