Incumbent Democratic House candidates who often criticize wealthy elites spent thousands of donor dollars on luxury hotels since April, newly released campaign records show.
The campaigns of Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and so-called Squad members, Reps. Summer Lee (D-PA) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), each paid upwards of $1,000 per visit at upscale hotels, according to Federal Election Commission documents. The three far-left lawmakers focus their political brands around combating money’s influence in politics, including when they all portrayed Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as corrupt in 2023 for accepting luxury gifts and travel.
The three Democrats’ campaigns did not respond to the Washington Examiner‘s requests for comment. They are each up for reelection in November.
Lee’s campaign wrote down $1,450 in “travel” expenses on April 28 for CordeValle Resort, a golf hotel in San Martin with a spa and other amenities, the campaign filings show. The records do not specify why Lee’s campaign spent money on a resort on the opposite coast from her congressional seat.
Three weeks earlier, the far-left lawmaker told a Michigan audience that the rich are their adversaries at a rally for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul el Sayed. “I see other people who are fighting like hell to make you feel like your enemy is sitting next to you, that your enemy is somebody who worships differently than you are, or looks differently than you are, comes from a different socioeconomic status than you — unless they are the [upper] class, then that is your enemy,” Lee said in a video posted by the Washington Free Beacon.
Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign spent up to $2,200 at four-star hotels in Georgia, Illinois, multiple Manhattan areas, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Minnesota, including in May at a Chicago facility next to a beach, according to the filings.
Meanwhile, Khanna’s campaign spent $1,167 in April at the four-star Pendry hotel in Manhattan and $3,302 for a “facility rental” at the Darcy hotel in D.C. that month, FEC records show.
Ocasio-Cortez and Lee became Democratic Socialists of America members to get elected and still largely align with the DSA’s movement, while Khanna calls himself a “progressive” capitalist. The three have pushed legislation to restrict PAC donations or gifts to Supreme Court justices, portraying it as an effort to rein in elites.
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“As it stands, Supreme Court Justices are accepting gifts from wealthy benefactors and people with special interests before the Court, actively furthering the distrust between working-class Americans and our legal institutions,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a Tuesday statement about her Supreme Court bill. The congresswoman also stayed at expensive hotels while rallying across the country for a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour last year, the Washington Examiner previously reported.
“We have a deep economic divide in this country,” Khanna said in March while announcing a proposed billionaire wealth tax bill. “On one side, places like Silicon Valley are generating extreme wealth. On the other side, families are struggling to cover the cost of health care, housing, and basic needs.”