Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will hold a vote Tuesday on the Green New Deal proposed by freshman New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, forcing Democrats to take a stand on the plan to tackle climate change.
The ambitious measure is largely expected to fail as it requires 60 votes to advance and both Republicans, who hold the majority, and Democrats have signaled they would not support it.
The plan, introduced with Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, aims to have the country transition completely to renewable energy in the next decade and eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. GOP members have voiced opposition, saying the measure would destroy the economy.
The Senate vote is widely seen as a political show-vote and a tactic to put Democrats running for president in 2020 in a politically tough spot, NBC News writes.
“The proposal we are talking about is, frankly, delusional. It is so unserious that it ought to be beneath one of our two major political parties to line up behind it,” McConnell said on the Senate floor earlier this month.
Republicans, The New York Times informs, also plan to keep the ambitious Green New Deal in the spotlight so as to present Democrats as socialists who are out of touch with American values. Over the past several weeks a number of Republicans have falsely accused supporters of the plan of wanting to ban cars and cows and outlaw air travel, calling the Green New Deal a “utopian manifesto” and a “socialist fantasy.”
Democrats, on the other hand, have accused the Senate majority leader of attempting to block any effort to fight climate change and have urged Republicans to come up with a plan of their own to tackle it.
Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter that the “GOP’s whole game of wasting votes in Congress to target others ‘on the record’, for leg they have no intent to pass, is a disgrace.”
She also called on them to not waste any more of “American peoples’ time + learn to govern,” calling the vote was a “bluff vote.”
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