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  • 2019-04-06 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Forget to Vote for Her Own Bill? (en)
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  • On 7 February 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, both Democrats, introduced a five-page nonbinding resolution to the U.S. House of Representatives for federal government to recognize its duty to establish a Green New Deal. The controversial proposal incorporated seven goals previously articulated by Ocasio-Cortez for the U.S. to realize within ten years: The broader proposal also called for sweeping social measures such as a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one, basic income programs and universal health care programs. On 26 March 2019, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell forced a preemptive vote in the U.S. Senate on a procedural motion to take up a binding form of the resolution, deriding the Green New Deal as a plan for basically outlawing the only sources of energy that working-class and middle-class families can actually afford that would kill off entire domestic industries and eliminate millions of jobs. Democrats criticized McConnell's move as a sham intended to quash debate by blocking public hearings and expert testimony about the consequences of inaction on climate change and to hasten a vote in order to force Senate Democrats to commit to either supporting or rejecting the proposal at a very early stage: In the event, most Democrats didn't bite. All 53 Republicans in the Senate voted against the plan, but they were joined by just three Democrats and independent Sen. Angus King of Maine (who caucuses with Democrats). The remaining 43 Democratic senators all declined to commit and merely voted present in protest of the GOP’s action. The procedural motion was thus voted down by a 57-0 margin. A meme circulated online afterwards offensively portrayed Rep. Ocasio-Cortez as a 100% retard for failing to even vote for [her] own bill: The implications of that meme were wrong on two counts: 1) The Senate was not voting on whether to accept or reject Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal resolution. What the Senate voted on was a different form of the resolution, and what they voted against was not the resolution itself but a motion for cloture, the step of agreeing to end debate on a bill so that Senate consideration of it can move forward: 2) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, not a member of the U.S. Senate, and thus she had no opportunity to vote on the cloture motion at all. In short, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez didn't neglect or forget to participate in the referenced Green New Deal vote: she wasn't eligible to take part in it because she isn't a member of the Senate. Nor was the vote that took place in the Senate one that directly addressed the merits or deficiencies of her Green New Deal resolution. (en)
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