The missing one of the quartet? Omar, who was back in Minnesota.
Via WSJ:
WASHINGTON—After weeks in the news because of her disputes with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and being on the receiving end of insults from President Trump, Rep. Ilhan Omar marched out of the Capitol Thursday afternoon, bringing traffic to a halt on Independence Avenue by the Mall, and told a gaggle of reporters not to stampede a photographer who fell in the melee.
“For the sake of a story, don’t kill each other,” she said.
As members of Congress go, Ms. Omar (D., Minn.) and the other three Democratic members of the self-described “squad” of new progressives already were celebrities for the impact they made when they arrived in Congress in January. She, with Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts met at a media interview in freshmen orientation and when Ms. Ocasio-Cortez posted a photo of the four on Instagram with the caption “squad,” the name stuck.
Since then, however, they have led a split-screen existence in the Democratic Party, inside and outside Congress.
In the chamber, they have frequently rankled colleagues and stolen the spotlight with their controversies and they have been in a long-running dispute over priorities with Mrs. Pelosi, with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez recently suggesting that the speaker was singling them out as people of color. She also compared southern border detention centers to concentration camps.
They have pushed, against party leadership’s wishes, for Mr. Trump’s impeachment. When she was sworn in earlier this year, Ms. Tlaib told a crowd of supporters that “we’re going to impeach the motherf—–”, overshadowing the inauguration of the new Democratic-controlled House.
Ms. Omar in February sent tweets that tied Jews to money and political influence. A month later, at an event in Washington, she accused politicians and special-interest groups trying to pressure her and others to support Israel of trying to “push for allegiance to a foreign country,” drawing rebukes that she was being anti-Semitic from lawmakers in both parties. A resulting House vote originally proposed to condemn anti-Semitism morphed, under pressure from the squad and the progressive caucus, into a diffused resolution condemning all forms of hate and eclipsed Democrats’ passage of an anticorruption bill.
And Ms. Ocasio-Cortez once threatened to back primary challenges to Democratic lawmakers they don’t view as sufficiently progressive.
Their legislative track records, meanwhile, have been scant, which isn’t unusual for freshmen, but some of their initiatives have been seized on by the opposition. The only vote that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal environmental plan has received, for instance, was in the Senate when GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell forced a vote to put Democratic senators on record for supporting what even many Democrats view as an unworkable plan.