Bring On the Green New Deal Vote

Bring On the Green New Deal Vote

The GND’s young organizers will help craft a message the 2020 Democratic candidate can get behind.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

The Green New Deal—summarized in a joint resolution introduced by charismatic first-year Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA)—has unleashed gale-force winds in Washington. President Trump immediately incorporated it into his new “socialism” riffs about Democrats, telling a crowd in El Paso, “I don’t like their policies of taking away your car, taking away your airplane flights,” or “you’re not allowed to own cows anymore.”

Some Democrats were also aflutter. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) dismissed it as “the green dream or whatever they call it. Nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?” Pelosi and key House committee chairs refused to back the notion of a special committee tasked with producing a comprehensive 10-year agenda. Across Capitol Hill, Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced he would force a vote on the resolution in the Senate, certain that anyone supporting it would be in a boatload of trouble. In response, reports are that some Senate Democrats are considering just voting “present” to duck the question.

I’d say: Bring it on, Mitch. Let’s have a vote—preferably in both houses—that reveals the Republicans frozen in denial about climate change and unwilling to do anything serious to address it. Let’s see who on the Democratic side is prepared to stand up and who is not.

Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

We cannot back down

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.

Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

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Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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