Thank you for this information.
The resolution is also in keeping with the Democratic Party’s longstanding strategy on climate—the Party has long assumed, probably correctly, that major climate action is unlikely unless addressing the crisis is woven securely into the Party’s economic agenda. A job guarantee, as radical as it seems, is an extension of the same logic that led the Obama Administration to tout the creation of green jobs. The resolution also ties climate action to the advancement of a variety of demographic groups, including many clearly important to the Party’s political future. There is much in the text about “frontline and vulnerable communities,” defined as “indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth,” for whom the Green New Deal will also “promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression.”
As the resolution begins moving through both chambers, Representative Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Markey, and other supporters will be drafting the legislation that the Green New Deal outlines. A source close to Senator Bernie Sanders told me on Thursday that he will unveil a Green New Deal bill within the next several months. “Obviously the Green New Deal is an expansive policy,” Stephen O’Hanlon, a spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, says. “It’s going to need to be multiple bills and long bills, so they’re working on that.” Of course, no bill they propose will be taken up unless Democrats win the White House in 2020, unseating a President who has claimed repeatedly that climate change is a hoax. In 2010, Democrats, who held the Presidency, the House, and the Senate, elected not to advance an ambitious cap-and-trade bill co-authored by Senator Markey, because they failed to secure the sixty Senate votes necessary to break a Republican filibuster. But the majority Party in the Senate can eliminate the filibuster unilaterally, provided it has fifty-one votes for doing so—a tactic used in recent years to eliminate the filibuster for executive and judicial nominees. At Thursday’s conference, I asked Markey whether, the next time Democrats hold Congress and the Presidency, they should eliminate the Senate filibuster to pass the Green New Deal. “That would be a good problem to have!” he said. “My own feeling is that this is going to be such a powerful issue in the 2020 election cycle that we’re going to have the Republican support, all across the country, to pass it with sixty votes and a supermajority in the House as well.”
The Trump-era Republican Party, though, will not be budging from climate skepticism any time soon. And, even if Democrats do extraordinarily well in the 2020 Senate elections, it is extremely unlikely that they will win sixty seats. In the best-case scenario for Democrats, the only paths forward for climate legislation are the elimination of the filibuster or, perhaps, the passage of certain tax and spending provisions through budget reconciliation, a maneuver that only requires a simple majority. These are also the only ways to pass other ambitious parts of the Democratic agenda, such as Medicare for All, now nominally supported by all of the Party’s top-tier 2020 Presidential candidates. Denial about this is widespread—no candidate, not even Bernie Sanders, has openly supported eliminating the filibuster. Deploying it would radically transform federal lawmaking and bring American politics to a new, precarious place. It is difficult to imagine Democrats building the will to consider that move easily. It was also difficult to imagine, mere months ago, that the Green New Deal would become the Party’s flagship proposal for climate action. Yet, here we are.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/with-the-green-new-deal-democrats-present-a-radical-proposition-for-combatting-climate-change
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