Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez masterfully exposed America's broken campaign finance system

Maybe you've never heard of the H.R. 1 bill, but chances are you've seen the viral video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez playing what she's called the "Corruption Game."

On Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing about H.R. 1., also known as For the People Act of 2019, which would do things like establish automatic voter registration nationwide, make Election Day a federal holiday, and reform a corrupt campaign finance system. Ocasio-Cortez exposed the problems in that system in just five minutes.

Ocasio-Cortez's sketch and line of questioning went viral after the hearing, which got people talking about the bill.

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“To take a kind of esoteric issue, and executive branch ethics and campaign finance reform, and to bring that to life for people, and then it becomes this viral moment was really incredible,” says Karen Hobert Flynn, president of the grassroots organization Common Cause, and one of the expert witnesses at the H.R. 1 hearing.

Hobert Flynn credits Ocasio-Cortez for cutting through the "distorted picture" that Republican members of Congress had painted. Rep. Ken Buck, a Republican from Colorado, claimed the bill is an attempt by Democrats to steal elections. In reality, Hobert Flynn says the legislation will diminish the wealthy's ability to dominate politics and campaign speech.

Flynn says Ocasio-Cortez is successful at drawing attention to mundane issues because she takes a much more conversational approach.

"She speaks to the concerns Americans have about our democracy and about the ways that our current system is failing its people, its communities, their families," she says. "She does it both through storytelling and by connecting clearly with people's values."

In the hearing, Ocasio-Cortez suggests a "lightning round game" in which she plays "the bad guy" putting their interests "ahead of the American people." She first asks Hobert Flynn if there's anything legally preventing her from running a campaign that is entirely funded by corporate political action committees. Hobert Flynn says there's not.

As the hypothetical "bad guy"/elected official, Ocasio-Cortez then goes on to write and influence legislation that benefits the companies that funneled money to her campaign. She also manages to get rich quick because, as a stockholder in oil and gas companies, she deregulates those industries and their stock prices theoretically skyrocket. Ocasio-Cortez introduced these scenarios as part of a game, but they're all plausible -- and none of them are illegal.

"A lot of the American people would see that as a huge conflict of interest and just plain wrong," says Hobert Flynn. "But it's perfectly legal."

Although Hobert Flynn didn't know she was in the middle of an exchange that would soon go viral, she knows Ocasio-Cortez is uniquely good at making politics digestible.

"I, like everyone else, have witnessed the ability for Representative Ocasio-Cortez to really approach issues in a refreshing and new way that engages people all over the country," she says.

The exchange also caught the attention of celebrities like John Legend, Katie Couric, comedian Patton Oswalt, and Late Late Show host James Corden.

"Oh my god. This is just sensational," Corden wrote in a tweet sharing the video. "Please watch and retweet." His tweet got more than 380,00 retweets and nearly 750,000 likes by the time this story was published.

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Hobert Flynn says the brief exchange brought an incredible surge of interest in the bill itself as well as the issue of democracy reform.

"We saw unprecedented activity on Twitter and other social media as a result of this and we're grateful because it has lifted our efforts to move transformative democracy reforms in Congress and across the country," she says.

AOC for the win — again.