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Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has lambasted the inner workings of Congress, referring to the day-to-day life in the U.S. Capitol as a "sh** show."
The comments, made during a new interview with The New Yorker published Monday, focused on Ocasio-Cortez's past three years as one of the nation's most visible congresswomen, and how becoming the youngest-ever woman in Congress at the age of 29 helped shape her politics.
When New Yorker editor David Remnick called the outside view of Congress a "sh** show" during the interview, Ocasio-Cortez stated her feelings on the matter were similar.
"Honestly, it is a sh** show," Ocasio-Cortez told the publication. "It's scandalizing, every single day. What is surprising to me is how it never stops being scandalizing."
"Some folks perhaps get used to it, or desensitized to the many different things that may be broken, but there is so much reliance on this idea that there are adults in the room, and, in some respect, there are," the representative continued. "But sometimes to be in a room with some of the most powerful people in the country and see the ways that they make decisions—sometimes they're just susceptible to groupthink, susceptible to self-delusion."
When pressed on the matter, Ocasio-Cortez called out the "sensationalism" that she felt was hindering the passage of major legislation. This includes the Build Back Better agenda put forth by President Joe Biden, the majority of which Ocasio-Cortez has supported.
"The Build Back Better Act is the vast majority of Biden's agenda. The infrastructure plan, as important as it is, is much smaller. So we were talking about pairing these two things together," Ocasio-Cortez said. "The Progressive Caucus puts up a fight, and then somewhere around October there comes a critical juncture. The President is then under enormous pressure from the media. There's this idea that the President can't 'get things done,' and that his Presidency is at risk. It's what I find to be just a lot of sensationalism."
"However, the ramifications of that were being very deeply felt," she added.
Ocasio-Cortez, often considered the leader of a group of progressive Democrats that she herself coined "the Squad," also voiced her concerns that democratic backsliding in the U.S. could lead to the eventually fall of the current government.
When asked if she believed the U.S. will still have a democracy in a decade, the representative replied, "I think there's a very real risk that we will not. What we risk is having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to pretend that it is, but isn't."
"We've already seen the opening salvos of this, where you have a very targeted, specific attack on the right to vote across the United States, particularly in areas where Republican power is threatened by changing electorates and demographics...what we have is the continued sophisticated takeover of our democratic systems in order to turn them into undemocratic systems, all in order to overturn results that a party in power may not like," Ocasio-Cortez said.
"There are many impulses to compare this to somewhere else. There are certainly plenty of comparisons to make—with the rise of fascism in post-World War I Germany," she continued. "But you really don't have to look much further than our own history, because what we have, I think, is a uniquely complex path that we have walked."
This is not the first time Ocasio-Cortez has voiced her concerns on the potential downfall of democracy, and has taken legislative action. This past December, the House of Representatives passed the Protecting Democracy Act, which included four amendments introduced by Ocasio-Cortez.
These include efforts to tamper nepotistic practices within the executive branch, codifying a new ethics pledge and regulating legal defense funds, among other things.
Newsweek has reached out to Ocasio-Cortez's office for comment.
