Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s pet project, the Green New Deal, was predictably put down after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., brought the measure up for a vote to find out where Democrats stand on the resolution.
During a House Financial Services Committee markup on Tuesday of several bills, Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., responded to a Republican member’s criticism of her resolution as being “elitist” and shifted the blame on Republicans for not taking climate change seriously enough.
Watch every second of this… @AOC is so incredibly spot on. pic.twitter.com/ESP4dC5TTo
— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) March 27, 2019
The Green New Deal got 57 “no’s” and 43 “presents.” So what are the Democrats trying to accomplish?
In an attempt to save face, AOC tweeted that she encouraged Senate Democrats to vote present because McConnell tried to rush the Green New Deal straight to the floor without a hearing.
Because I encouraged them to vote present, along w/ others.
McConnell tried to rush the #GreenNewDeal straight to the floor without a hearing.
The real question we should be asking: Why does the Senate GOP refuse to hold any major hearings on climate change? https://t.co/de8oKOXeJf
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 26, 2019
But Democrats, including those who co-sponsored the Green New Deal, didn’t abstain from voting for it out of some principled stand.
Rather, they were running away from the $93 trillion embarrassment that Ocasio-Cortez created for them when she rolled out the resolution, with its ambitious plans to phase out air transportation. None of them wanted to go on record in favor of zeroing out U.S. carbon emissions in less than 10 years without any help from nuclear energy, a draconian and ludicrous plan that would do massive economic damage.
Since the resolution was introduced, both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein have criticized it, and proposed alternatives that could get at least bipartisan, or unipartisan, support. For this, Feinstein received plenty of flack, and was even confronted by a group of children.
The Green New Deal has always been about messaging in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. It’s about shifting the Overton window in the Democratic party further to the Left, toward the new caucus of congressional socialists. But with five Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate co-sponsoring yet refusing to vote for the Green New Deal, it seems to have failed in accomplishing even that much.
