President Biden is making the Green New Deal happen by not calling it the “Green New Deal”
Progressives have been promoting the “Green New Deal” for a couple years now, and it’s succeeding in forcing the issue when it comes to confronting climate change. The trouble is that, even though the legislation polls well with the left and even the middle, the right has succeeded in painting it as some kind of evil socialist job killing scheme.
In other words, if the Democrats pass the “Green New Deal” into law, the Republicans could succeed in using it against them in the 2022 midterms. So instead President Biden is taking a different approach. Today he took huge chunks of the Green New Deal and simply enacted them via executive order. There was no need for an ugly legislative battle over a controversial overarching bill. He just made it happen.
We’ll see where this goes next. But Biden’s moves today mean that the Green New Deal, as it’s written, is no longer necessary. Now the Democrats have an opportunity to rewrite and rename the legislation, focusing solely on the aspects that Biden wasn’t able to do via executive order. We now have a chance to make 100% of the Green New Deal happen, simply by no longer painting it as being the “Green New Deal.”
