Rep. Tom Suozzi( D-N.Y .) is backing the Green New Deal.
On Monday the moderate Long Island Democrat told HuffPost he plans to add his reputation to the nearly 70 House Democrat co-sponsoring the sweeping answer that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez( D-N.Y .) and Sen. Ed Markey( D-Mass .) released last-place Thursday.
“Rep. Suozzi supports the Green New Deal, ” said Jay Bhargava, Suozzi’s press secretary.
Suozzi’s support is notable because he occupies a seat on the influential House Committee on Ways and Means, the oldest congressional decision-making panel, with sovereignty over taxation, international trade agreements and social insurance curricula like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment benefits.
The joint resolving bets out an ambitious agenda for any Green New Deal legislation, calling for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from every major sector of its national economy, stipulating clean-living power undertakings to millions of Americans and hugely expanding the social safety net.
Suozzi is also the frailty chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, entailing he could help woo Republican support for a Lettuce New Deal.
In November, when Ocasio-Cortez endorse a Resolution to establish a special committee in the House on a Lettuce New Deal, Suozzi supported the effort. He called the project “daunting” but said in a Facebook post, “The real question is, is impossible to afford not to reenact the Green New Deal? ”
The Green New Deal solving, outlining the core maxims of what should be included in future legislation, arrived to considerable fanfare, dramatically altering the terms of the climate policy debate away from carbon pricing schemes toward the kind of vigorous government act scientists say matches the scale of their own problems.
The resolution ran into some controversy in the days that followed. Ocasio-Cortez’s office liberated the resolution to reporters on Wednesday night with a separate FAQ document that seemed to contradict some aspects of the resolution, including taking postures on nuclear energy and agricultural releases that didn’t appear in the official document. She tweeted Saturday “a draft version that got uploaded+ taken down, ” but questions remain.
Yet the quicken with which Democrat are ordering up to support the resolution regardless speaks to the crisis it aims to address. A vast contingent of the New York delegation once co-sponsored the resolution, and neighborhoods like Suozzi’s, which strains along the North Shore of Long Island from Queens into Suffolk County, face disastrous hazards from sea level rise and more violent storms.
It likewise speaks to the esteem of the Green New Deal’s territory aims. In a poll liberated in December, 81 percent of surveyed registered voters indicates that they subscribe its targets — including 64 percentage of Republicans and 57 percentage of conservative Republicans. A survey from this month concluded a restricted majority of voters subsidized collecting taxes to money a Green New Deal.
In January a majority of Democratic voters polled in New York’s 4th Congressional District, which pulls along the opposite shore of Long Island from Suozzi’s, said they would support a primary challenger to moderate Rep. Kathleen Rice if she did not support a Green New Deal. A spokesman for her did not immediately respond to an email asking if she would attach Suozzi in backing the relevant resolutions.
“It’s great to meet so much support for the Green New Deal, ” said Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for the left-wing group Justice Democrat, which has propagandized the resolution. “It’s staggering what just a few primary challenges can fulfill for saving our economy and planet for working people in this country.”
This story has been revised throughout.
