In a now viral video, freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used her time during a hearing on government ethics to play a "lighting round game" meant to highlight the United State's broken campaign finance laws and how government officials, namely the President, can personally benefit off of them.

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Earlier today we had our second Oversight hearing of the 116th Congress. It was about voting rights and the role of money in politics.



I asked the expert witnesses to indulge me in a small game.



Here’s what happened ⬇️ https://t.co/q31QdNx9KE — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 6, 2019

She started off by explaining that, in this game, she's the bad guy and her goal is to get away with "as much bad things as possible, ideally to enrich myself and advance my interests, even if that means putting my interests ahead of the American people." She then goes on to ask questions like...

Can I run a campaign that's entirely funded by corporate PAC money? (Yes.)

Can I use that money to pay people off in order to get elected? (Yes.)

Once I'm elected, are there any limits to which laws I can write or influence? (No.)

Does all this mean an elected official can, for example, be funded by Big Pharma companies and then get into office and write laws benefitting Big Pharma with no limitations? (Yes.)

Can I hold stocks in an industry, say oil and gas, and then write laws to deregulate that industry in a way that would cause the stock value to go up, causing me to get rich? (Yes.)

After posing all these questions, she says, "So we have a system that is fundamentally broken," before explaining that she, and the rest of Congress, are being held to higher ethical standards than the President of the United States. (Walter Shaub, the former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, confirms this by saying "There's almost no laws at all that apply to the President.") Her point, in the end, is that if it's legal for a congresswoman to "be a bad guy," even though she has some ethical standards placed on her as a member of Congress, it's even easier for the President to be one.

Later that day, Shaub tweeted about the exchange, saying that, "Rep. Ocasio-Cortez @aoc powerfully walked through ways that loopholes in our fractured system are exploited to gain and misuse entrusted power for private gain. It was peek behind the closed doors of smoke-filled rooms where democracy is stolen."

Madison Feller Madison is a staff writer at ELLE.com, covering news, politics, and culture.

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