Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called on Democrats to not fold on their health insurance demands before true negotiations begin to reopen the government.

“They want us to blink first, and we have too much to save. Protecting people is too important a task for us to give up before anything even starts,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview Tuesday night on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes.”

Asked about the “rising sense of alarm about the aggressiveness of the sort of authoritarian aspirations of this government,” the progressive Democrat agreed that there “absolutely is an unprecedented abuse of power,” but said, “they are weaker than they look.”

“What they rely on is the impression of power, the perception of inevitability, in us giving up in advance to say, ‘Oh, what's going to

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