In Early 2019, AOC sat down with her staff and opened the discussion: Do we vote against this funding proposal for the Department of Homeland Security? She laid out the terms of the debate to her team. The bill includes money for things that we don't support, and we might be the only vote against it. Meanwhile, it won't become law. It's a messaging bill, and the message is that Democrats are being the adults in the room, while Trump has a tantrum. Voting no and drawing a line in the sand now, she said, would mean they'd have to vote against all future government funding bills. "Where do we draw that line?" she asked. "What is enough?" Before she could finish the question, Corbin Trent interrupted with an answer in the form of his own question: "Yeah, what is enough to fund a fascist agency that cages children?" Nobody had an answer. "We all just kind of looked at each other," her aide Dan Riffle recalled. "Like, nothing. Nothing is enough. So, we're a 'no' on this." Corbin's intervention had ended the conversation, but it was clear that what they were trying to do was going to be a challenge. "You could see not just her, but me, everybody in the office, sort of like doing the thing" Riffle said. "It's going to be hard," he realized. "It's going to be hard for us to be principled here."
