In the seven weeks since she became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has joined a protest staged in Nancy Pelosi's office, established a new standard to pay interns $15 an hour, tussled with Sen. Lindsey Graham and the president's eldest son on Twitter and made rumblings about stirring a primary challenge against a new member of House leadership from her own state.

Before this 29-year-old Democratic socialist Latina from the Bronx is even sworn in to the House next week, she's become one of the most influential figures in the Democratic Party – and the unordained leader of a flock of progressive renegade freshman females hellbent on breaking the norms of the institution and challenging the notion that seniority means supremacy.

Many of their electoral victoriesover a quarter of the class – totalling 63 members – will be freshmen. And during the transition period, a handful of incoming members – self-described as the "squad" – have signaled their intentions to rock the boat.

They not only look different than your father's stodgy, old, whitebread Congress, they're making moves both substantive and symbolic that break with protocol and tradition. And they aren't doing it quietly.

Michigan's Rashida Tlaib, who at 42 years old is the first Palestinian-American woman elected to the House, raised eyebrows when she announced she would lead a delegation to her mother's native West Bank rather than partake in the traditional freshman trip to Israel. She said she hoped to humanize the plight of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territory and show new members