It’s not just the presidential election that’s coming down to the wire. The race for the House of Representatives is also looking to be a toss-up, according to forecasters, and the presidential campaigns are keenly aware of how intertwined their own success—on Nov. 5 and during any potential administration that follows—is with what party ends up controlling Congress.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz joined progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the streaming platform Twitch on Sunday to play games and talk politics.
The two spoke for almost an hour, while playing Madden and Crazy Taxi, about a range of topics—from social security benefits for children who have lost a parent to their reactions to Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump’s Sunday night rally speaker who joked about Puerto Rico being an “island of garbage.” But the right has seized on one three-second moment in which Walz seemed to promise Ocasio-Cortez that Democrats, if elected, would “put a gavel in your hand in the House.”
“Walz told Ocasio-Cortez that if he and Kamala Harris win the election, he would make her the Speaker of the House,” Fox News reported. “Wow! Tim Walz just told AOC she has a good chance of being SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE under a Harris-Walz administration,” Trump-affiliated conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer posted on X.
But the three-second clip—which was shared by Trump’s campaign in a post on X that has, as of this article’s publication, more views than the original Twitch stream it was excerpted from—has been misleadingly taken out of context.
(TIME reached out to the Harris and Trump campaigns about the claim that Democrats would make Ocasio-Cortez Speaker of the House. Neither immediately responded.)
While references to the “gavel” with respect to Congress have long been associated with the Speaker and control of the House, which Republicans hope to retain, the Minnesota governor’s comment came amid a discussion that clearly referenced other uses of a gavel in congressional procedure.
Ocasio-Cortez had mentioned her membership on a House artificial intelligence task force, which prompted Walz, a former lawmaker himself, to say he was glad she was on it and that he thinks too often people are “cynical” about politics. He then said, “We’re going to win this election. We’re going to make you—put a gavel in your hand in the House, maybe for that committee, to go and get something done.” Walz went on: “I think for your listeners to understand, when you’re in the House of Representatives, whoever has the gavel, that’s pretty much everything, makes the decision. So if you want folks who actually have a to-do list and want to get it done, stay engaged.”
The extended remarks alluded to “the gavel” to reference power in Congress, held by the majority party. But it’s not just the Speaker who wields “a gavel.” Committee chairs, who belong to the party in power, also hold gavels during committee hearings, and though the Bipartisan Task Force on AI is not a committee and Ocasio-Cortez is not a chair of it, she is the ranking member (the lead Democrat) on the subcommittee on energy and mineral resources and would presumably become the chair if Democrats win control of the House.
But even aside from committee chairs, Democrats empowered with a majority could “put a gavel” in Ocasio-Cortez’s hand without making her Speaker, as conservatives were so quick to assume Walz meant. After her election in 2018, Ocasio-Cortez took a turn sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s chair and holding the Speaker’s gavel in May 2019, presiding over the House for about an hour as part of a “routine rotation,” according to Reuters, as “the duty is shared day-to-day by members of the House majority.”
Ocasio-Cortez made Walz’s point even more clear moments later during their discussion, when she added: “You put gavels in our hands in the House, we’re getting hearings, we’re dragging in Big Pharma CEOs, we’re starting investigations, we’re talking about the Supreme Court.”
In reality, the likely next Speaker of the House will be either current Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) or current House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), depending on the outcome of the Nov. 5 elections across the country, followed by party leadership votes.
Republicans have long obsessed over Ocasio-Cortez, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist whom GOP leadership have called a radical leftist—a label they’ve also tried to apply to Harris and Walz. For her part, Ocasio-Cortez has used her platform to advocate for Harris and Walz to the left—some of which continues to show unease with the Democratic Party, particularly over the issue of the war in Gaza. “We don’t all share the same politics, we don’t all share the same views,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the start of her stream on Sunday, “but the need to defeat Trump this year has been my number one priority.”
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