Ambitious proposals to end climate change and provide healthcare for everyone, seen as socialist by Republicans, have failed to win the support of even half of the House Democratic caucus, effectively dooming any chance of floor consideration.
Support appears to have plateaued for both the Green New Deal resolution as well as the Medicare for All national health insurance proposal.
The Green New Deal, introduced Feb. 7 by rising freshman star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., calls for a complete overhaul of the nation’s housing, transportation, businesses, and agriculture to end carbon emissions and to stave off climate change.
But of the 235 Democrats in the House, Ocasio-Cortez’s bill has the backing of just 90 of her colleagues, and picked up just one new co-sponsor since Feb. 25. That’s a little more than a third of the Democrats and far fewer than the 218 needed to pass it without any GOP support.
The Medicare for All bill, introduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., isn’t faring much better.
The bill had 106 co-sponsors when it was introduced on Feb. 27. Two weeks later, no other Democrat has co-sponsored the plan to eliminate all private health insurance and turn the nation’s entire healthcare system over to the government.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a progressive, has criticized both proposals and isn’t taking them seriously, even though several Senate Democrats running for president back the measures.
Pelosi can afford to keep the legislation from ever reaching the floor since the two proposals have won over far fewer than half of the rank and file.
“The new green deal, is it?” Pelosi said when reporters asked about it last week, keeping with her habit of misstating the name of the proposal. She called it the “green dream” in February.
Pelosi told reporters she is “more excited” about a newly created climate change panel chaired by Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., which won’t write legislation but will hold hearings and providing recommendations to other committees that will write bills addressing climate change.
Those proposals, Pelosi said, could incorporate elements of the Green New Deal.
Ocasio-Cortez, who recently told her vast following on social media that the threat of climate change should prompt people to reconsider having children, declined a seat on the special climate change panel.
House Democrats, wary her superstar power, have mostly refrained from directly criticizing the Green New Deal, which was initially introduced with a supporting document that called for making plane travel unnecessary and eliminating methane-emitting cows.
But most Democrats aren’t lining up to put their names on the document.
“I appreciate the aspiration, but I won’t be signing on,” Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, told the Washington Examiner.
Democrats are also careful not to criticize Medicare for All.
“We get, as a party, that we want to go to a place where everyone has full coverage,” said Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich.
But Stevens, who like other centrist Democrats has not signed on to the Medicare for All bill, believe it is more realistic to pass legislation to reform the struggling Affordable Care Act, which Pelosi passed a decade ago and keeps private health insurance intact.
Meanwhile, Republicans have cited both bills as evidence that Democrats are veering toward socialism.
“Our nation has watched the Democratic Party take a sharp and abrupt left turn toward socialism,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said this week. “A flawed ideology that has been rejected time and again across the world is now driving the marquee policy proposals of the new House Democrat majority.”
McConnell will force Democrats to go on the record at the end of March when he calls up the Green New Deal for a vote. Democrats are trying to turn the tables on the GOP, accusing them of ignoring a looming climate crisis.
“We Democrats are ready to work,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor last week. “Will Leader McConnell bring his own members clean energy legislation to the floor?”
