House GOP resolution blasts 'Green New Deal' as violating nation's 'bedrock principles'
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal is a "thinly veiled" attempt to push policies that would create a socialist society, a resolution pushed by the Republican Study Committee said on Wednesday.
Decrying the millions of deaths under socialist regimes, the resolution stated that the plan, so strongly supported by Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., would violate basic American principles -- rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- explode the country's national debt, and put forth many proposals with "no connection at all to climate change."
“When we began the 116th Congress, most Americans had no idea how far to the radical left the new Democrat majority would attempt to push the country," Committee Chairman Mike Johnson, R-La., said in a press release on Wednesday.
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"The ‘Green New Deal’ may be the most outrageous set of proposals ever presented in the U.S. Congress, and we have an obligation to expose this dangerous agenda for what it is and what it would mean for every American."
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Ocasio-Cortez's office did not respond to a request for comment.
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The resolution came after the freshman congresswoman criticized other Democratic proposals for lacking the ambition that hers had. During a rally for the program, she seemed to knock former Vice President Joe Biden for pushing a more moderate approach to grappling with climate change.
In a video from a possible future, Ocasio-Cortez described Green New Deal legislation as "the kind of swing-for-the-fence ambition we needed" amid impending climate catastrophe.
"Finally, we were entertaining solutions on the scale of the crises we faced without leaving anyone behind," she said during the video.
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But according to Republicans, Ocasio-Cortez's policy dream is a nightmare, one that's at once unrealistic and too expensive. “The Green New Deal is a socialist’s wish list of absurd proposals rooted in fantasy and funded by raising your taxes. It deserves to be defeated," Rep. Ralph Abraham, R-La., said.
The new resolution, with more than 50 original co-sponsors, points to an American Action Forum estimate putting the Green New Deal's total cost at $93 trillion over 10 years. It also described Ocasio-Cortez's clean energy goal -- using renewable energy sources to meet 100 percent of the nation's power demand -- as "technologically impossible."
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In addition to renewable energy, the deal's goals included a jobs guarantee, universal health care and free college tuition.
President Trump has dismissed the Green New Deal as a "hoax."
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Ocasio-Cortez has pushed back against her critics, suggesting they were overly pessimistic. She also criticized Trump after he likened her deal to a "high school term paper that got a low mark."
"Ah yes, a man who can’t even read briefings written in full sentences is providing literary criticism of a House Resolution," she tweeted, referring to a report that Trump preferred not to read his daily intelligence briefing.
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But Ocasio-Cortez also appeared to face pushback from her own party as 42 Democrats, in March, voted present on a measure to bring her Green New Deal to the floor for debate.
During an interview aired in April, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was dismissive of Ocasio-Cortez's influence and, like Republicans, rejected socialism as an economic system.