NYTimes: Ocasio-Cortez Builds a National Platform, but a District Office? Not Open Yet

[EffieBlack]

50. "SOME Members" but not all of them - the others managed to open new offices with no problem

And note that Fitch didn't say a "month or two" from the day they're sworn in. In fact, he specifically said that she had plenty of time long before she was sworn in to start making arrangements for her office space. Members don't wait until they're sworn in to start the process - the process starts as soon as they're elected, and sometimes before. I'm sure she didn't just discover on January 3 what the landlord planned to charge in rent for the office.

And even if that was the problem, why didn't she just say that when talking to Colbert, instead of blaming it on the shutdown, which we now see has absolutely nothing to do with her failure to open her office? She didn't say, "I haven't opened my office because the landlord tried to double the rent, so I had to start from scratch on January 3, so it will be a couple of months before I can get an office.""

No - she said, "“There’s a lot of things we can’t do as freshmen members. We can’t properly set up our district offices. We can’t get laptops delivered. We can’t start doing the work that we were elected here to do. It takes the green stuff. And those workers are furloughed.”

She blamed it on the furlough, yet the furlough didn't delay any of her colleagues from arranging for and moving into offices - even those who didn't inherit their predecessors space.

You can defend and deflect all you want. But she's flat-footed on this one. But, as I said, it's early enough that she can fix it and show her constituents that she's actually interested in representing them.