Democratic members of Congress have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on private security, despite being proponents for the “defund t...
Democratic members of Congress have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on private security, despite being proponents for the “defund the police.”
Fox News reported Tuesday that Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri and other members of the progressive posse known as the “squad” (Reps. Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman) spent $325,000 on private security in 2021.
That is enough money to buy a Lamborghini and still have plenty left over for that trip to the Riviera.
However, while they’re obviously willing to spend plenty of money on their own security, these Democrats have been some of the strongest voices for the movement to defund the police.
Bush spent the most, coming in at $65,000 spent on private security for herself just in the fourth quarter, according to Fox. In 2021 overall, she spent about $200,000 on private security.
When she was asked in August how she justified her belief that the police should be defunded but then spent hundreds of thousands on private security, Bush accused her critics of wanting her dead.
“They would rather I die? You would rather me die? Is that what you want to see? You want to see me die? You know, because that could be the alternative. So either I spent $70,000 on private security over the last few months, and I’m here standing now and able to speak,” she told CBS News.
“I have private security because my body is worth being on this planet right now. I have private security because they, the white supremacist racist narrative that they drive into this country. The fact that they don’t care that this Black woman that has put her life on the line, they can’t match my energy first of all,” she added.
In the summer of 2020, amid the nationwide rioting sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Omar, whose district is in Minneapolis, spoke out in support of defunding the city’s police department so it could be reinvented, because “you can’t really reform a department that is rotten to the root,” she said, as Axios reported.
“If you had a company that wasn’t producing, you wouldn’t just pour more money into it so that it would produce,” Omar told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “You would step back and say, ‘let’s look at what works, what doesn’t work, and how do we move forward?'”
In 2021, Omar spent over $30,000 on private security in 2021, according to Fox.
In 2020, Ocasio-Cortez, whose district is in New York City, proposed budget cuts for the city’s police and called for more drastic measures.
“Defunding police means defunding police,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the time. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math. It does not mean moving school police officers from the NYPD budget to the Department of Education’s budget so the exact same police remain in schools.”
AOC spent about $9,800 during the fourth quarter of 2021 on private security, Fox reported.
Other members of the “squad” spent less than Bush, Omar, and AOC, but still doled out plenty.
According to Fox, Pressley, of Massachusetts, spent about $14,000 in 2021; Bowman, of New York, spent $7,872; and Tlaib, of Michigan, spent the least at less than $3,000.
The apparent contradiction in their words and actions does not seem to bother these members of Congressmen, though. Everyone else seems to recognize how self-contradictory they are in their words and actions, but that does not seem to faze them in the slightest.
It seems to just be another day of bold two-face tactics for the Democrats.
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