‘It’s a token of elite tribal identity—and endorsing it, a public act of piety for the chic and woke…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Amid concerns over whether the Democrat-supported Green New Deal could end commercial air flight as we know it, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, offered some bold replacements for travel: dinosaurs, tauntauns and giant seahorses.
The Senate voted by party line to defeat the Green New Deal measure, which was introduced in the upper chamber by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and cosponsored by about a dozen radical liberals—half of whom have announced presidential runs.
The House counterpart, introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-NY, was unlikely to come to a vote in the foreseeable future.
The final tally in the Senate was 57-0, with Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.; Doug Jones, D-Ala.; Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.; and Angus King, I-Maine, joining their GOP colleagues to oppose it.
The remaining Democrats (and socialist Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.) voted “present” in protest of what they called a “sham” political move.
But Republicans, including Lee, pushed back by saying the entire premise of the vote was, in fact, a sham political move, The Daily Caller reported.
“There isn’t a single serious idea here—not one,” Lee said in his speech on the Senate floor Tuesday.
Referring to an iconic—but not historically accurate—portrait of former President Ronald Reagan toting a machine gun while riding a velociraptor, Lee said, “This image has as much to do with overcoming communism in the 20th century as the Green New Deal has to do with overcoming climate change in the 21st.”
Lee’s speech directly lampooned some of the more absurd suggestions that appeared in the GND’s initial framework, which Ocasio–Cortez later deleted, claiming it was a draft version.
Among the radical measures necessary for its goal of attaining net-zero carbon emissions within 10 years were some that would have drastically changed American lifestyles.
Regarding the notion of eliminating air travel, the Utah senator criticized the main sponsors and other Democrat supporters from the heavily liberal, historically elitist New England states for failing to recognize the needs of all constituents.
“This might seem merely ambitious for politicians who represent the densely populated northeastern United States,” Lee said, “but how’s it supposed to work for our fellow citizens who don’t live somewhere between Washington, D.C., and Boston?”
In what was at least the second recent example of the Star Wars universe intersecting with the realm of climate policy, Lee said tauntauns might offer a suitably viable solution.
“These hairy bipedal species of space lizards offer their own unique benefits,” he said. “Not only are tauntauns carbon-neutral, but according to a report a long time ago and issued far, far away, they may even be fully recyclable.”
The GND proposal also targeted “cow farts”—recognized to be one of the leading sources of methane released into the atmosphere—with the implication being that the socialist overhaul would remove beef from our diets, with bantha poodoo likely to follow in short succession.
But Lee warned, “If they think the cows smell bad, just wait till they get a whiff of the seahorses.”
Barring air travel would leave the transport option favored by Aquaman of the kingdom of Atlantis as the best bet for Hawaiians trying to reach the mainland, he said.
However, even though Lee conceded that “a massive fleet of giant, highly-trained seahorses … would be really, really awesome,” he saw several red flags in the plan.
“The last thing we want is to ban all airplanes and only then find out that China or Russia may have already established strategic hippocampus programs,” Lee said.
Lee concluded his speech on a more serious note, taking Ocasio–Cortez to task for her efforts to backpedal on the proposals, which actually hurt its credibility even more.
“Supporters of the Green New Deal want Americans to trust them to reorganize our entire society … and they couldn’t even figure out how to send out the right press release,” he said.
Lee said the plan, with an estimated cost of $93 trillion if all of its demands were met, amounted to little more than an expensive ploy for the Left to virtue-signal and campaign on while distracting from real issues.
“The resolution is not an agenda of solutions,” he said. “It’s a token of elite tribal identity—and endorsing it, a public act of piety for the chic and woke.”