It turns out some of the country’s best-known and most infamous Democratic women seem to have a strangely flexible concept of marriage.
While progressives tend to despise the institution, they appear to have an appreciation for it under certain circumstances (particularly circumstances involving two men and a baby).
But when it really suits their personal desires and, even better, their personal finances, boy how liberals love it.
First, there was Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Somalia-born immigrant, who has been credibly accused of presenting her own brother as her husband in a scam to help him move to the front of the line in obtaining immigration papers.
Next, New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James found herself under investigation for real estate activities that reportedly included listing herself as her father’s “wife” for mortgage purposes.
Then, as July drew to a close, the bipartisan House Ethics Committee issued a report on New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s attendance at the 2021 Met Gala — a soiree of the rich and fatuous where Ocasio-Cortez appeared wearing an obnoxious “Tax the Rich” designer gown on the arm of a man who isn’t her “spouse” — by any definition of the word.
That last part matters a great deal because, according to the committee report, the New York City democratic socialist accepted a free ticket for then-boyfriend, now-fiance Riley Roberts (a beau whose status with AOC appears to depend on which form she’s filling out).
And there’s more to this than just a standard liberal grift.
Congressional ethics rules in force at the time, according to the report, allowed House members to accept free attendance at such events only “for themselves and either a spouse or dependent child.”
Are you surprised that these radical leftists would lie about a holy sacrament like marriage?
The report then helpfully noted that the House Ethics Manual defines “spouse” as “someone to whom you are legally married.”
To be fair, that’s a footnote from page 39 of the manual, but most Americans were probably already hip to that definition without needing to be told. Ethics manuals, however, have to spell things out.
Unfortunately, that’s only effective if the lawmakers covered by the manual actually choose to accept the manual’s definitions, which AOC did not.
According to the report, Ocasio-Cortez’s legal counsel claimed “the Congresswoman chose to follow campaign finance laws,” adding that such a determination “was and is a reasonable and logical conclusion to make, and the Committee should not so brazenly apply guidance limited to other sets of rules in other contexts.”
In a letter to the committee, AOC attorney David Mitrani argued that the word “spouse” actually “had and has many meanings under different sets of law applicable to the Congresswoman’s actions.”
Under campaign finance laws, he wrote that “a person ‘who has a committed relationship with the candidate, such as sharing a household and mutual responsibility for each other’s welfare or living expenses’ is treated ‘as the equivalent of the candidate’s spouse’ for the purposes of the personal use rules.”
However deliberately duplicitous that sounds, lawyers get paid to make arguments like that. But the committee was having none of it.
“If counsel was unsure what guidance applied to the situation, counsel (or the congresswoman herself) should have contacted the Committee for advice, rather than ‘choosing’ which law to apply,” the report states.
“The Committee ‘takes very seriously its obligation to provide sound and dispassionate advice to the Members of this House’ and would have informed Representative Ocasio-Cortez and her counsel that Mr. Roberts did not fit the definition of a ‘spouse’ for purposes of the Charitable Events Exception.”
That sounds a lot like the committee is accusing AOC of failing to ask a question because she’s already decided what she wanted the answer to be — and the actual rules be damned.
This is a pattern for Democrats in the 21st century: Rules and precedents, even the definitions of words, are useful — and used — only insofar as they advance Democratic desires.
Just remember the utterly disgraceful circus surrounding the nomination of now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, when an out-of-the-blue accusation, with paper-thin credibility and even less evidence, essentially pushed the Senate Judiciary Committee to reopen its hearings just as the Trump nominee was on a “glidepath to party-line confirmation,” as Politico described it on Monday.
Kavanaugh, to his credit, refused to buckle, and sits on the high court now, but the spectacle was enough to prove that contemporary Democrats believe in nothing beyond their own agenda — whether it’s personal or political.
And that includes the concept of matrimony — a legally defined relationship between two consenting adults, under American law, as well as a sacrament that’s holy to every major denomination of Christianity, and an institution that’s sacred to both Jews and Muslims.
Omar and James are claiming their innocence when it comes to the accusations about abusing the definition of “spouse” to suit their familial or financial desires, though the cases against both appear pretty strong.
Ocasio-Cortez, however, has admitted what she did. But like a willfully obstinate high school student, she is arguing that the clearly relevant rule did not apply because she simply didn’t want it to.
What makes this particularly powerful in a federal government bitterly divided on partisan lines is that the 10-member ethics committee — divided equally between Republican and Democratic members — was unanimous in its report, as the New York Post noted.
The only good news for AOC and her blind believers is that the report watered down its conclusion to say it “did not find that Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s violations were knowing and willful.” But that sounds an awful lot like a sop to get the committee Democrats to go along with what’s otherwise a pretty scathing document.
Almost as bad, though, was what the committee required as punishment. AOC was ordered to pay $250 — the estimated amount of the meal her then-boyfriend consumed at the event — where individual tickets, as the ethics committee report noted, “were sold for $35,000 each.”
That’s a travesty — and any thinking adult, regardless of party, knows it.
But the real lesson is even worse.
Democratic policies hold marriage in pretty low regard — as a rule, leftists do not think of holy matrimony as the foundational religious rite of human society to produce children (“male and female He created them,” as Genesis puts it).
In the liberal mind, marriage is relegated to some sort of rite of passage on the path to gay rights, or nothing more than an individualistic cure for the “universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there,” as then-Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in his appalling Obergefell decision that permitted so-called same-sex marriage.
The cases of Omar and James might not be proven with the finality of the one against AOC, but the cumulative evidence in all three bears out the same conclusion.
Liberals love marriage — but for all the wrong reasons. And they don’t love the truth at all.
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