For Bronx Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her three-million-person Twitter army, the Green New Deal represents a bold step toward securing the planet from environmental catastrophe. For Republicans, it represents a potential political cudgel. “It’s crazy. It’s loony,” Republican Congressman Mike Simpson marveled to Politico on Tuesday, titillated at the prospect of lefty overreach. “I would like them to push it as far as they can. I’d like to see it on the floor. I’d like to see them actually have to vote on it.”

The Green New Deal is full of lofty proposals, such as building high-speed rails across the country to ultimately replace airplanes, making every building energy efficient, and severing America’s fossil-fuel umbilical cord in a decade. It includes a progressive wish-list of ancillary policies like universal health care, a federal jobs guarantee, higher wages, and labor protections. Naturally, it has also provided an irresistible target for Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders, who are eager to characterize the incoming crop of Democratic 2020 candidates as not just radical, but A.O.C.-level dangerous. On Tuesday afternoon, the Senate majority leader announced he would bring Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to a vote, telling reporters he’s “noted” the package “with great interest,” and will “give everybody a chance to go on record and see how they feel about the Green New Deal.”

View more

Other Republicans, too, have zeroed in on the deal as a potential Democratic weakness. When an outline of the package was made public last week, Senator Lindsey Graham called for a vote, so “Americans [can] see what kind of solutions far-left Democrats are offering to deal with climate change.” Donald Trump himself referenced the deal during his Monday rally in El Paso, Texas, telling supporters, “I really don’t like their policy of taking away your car, of taking away your airplane rights, of ‘let’s hop a plane to California,’ of you’re not allowed to own cows anymore.”

Taking Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to the Senate floor—a move that even Nancy Pelosi has yet to entertain in the House—is perhaps the most obvious indication yet that the Republican Party sees the freshman congresswoman and her progressive cohort as a threat to be neutralized. When A.O.C. first arrived in Washington, conservatives tried to dismiss her as an incoherent, if savvy, social-media presence. But mockery of her millennial quirks only backfired. (“If I could stand on a train track and wave a big flag and say, ‘Stop attacking her appearance. Stop attacking her clothes. Stop attacking her apartment’—I would,” National Review Online media critic Stephen L. Miller bemoaned to me last November). For a time, she appeared politically unassailable. New lines of attack, such as a proposed 70-percent marginal tax rate, have proven equally fruitless. Polls showed A.O.C.’s tax plan was broadly popular with voters, including with 45 percent of Republicans. Few people outside of the core Fox News demographic seem to believe that the U.S. is on the verge of becoming socialist Venezuela.

With the Green New Deal, however, McConnell and Co. seem to believe they’ve hit on the Benghazi of climate-change legislation: a “socialist fever dream” with “nothing of substance,” as one Republican congressman put it—a “piñata” the G.O.P. can bash all the way through 2020, said another. Given the current political undercurrents in the party, Democratic presidential candidates will be under immense pressure to endorse Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal—or at least offer rhetorical support for the concept. Already Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders have agreed to co-sponsor the resolution. (Sherrod Brown, who is still mulling a run, announced Tuesday that he would not co-sponsor a bill simply to “show my progressive politics.”) With a floor vote, McConnell hopes to put them all on the record.

Republicans hope they can convince voters that if they sign onto environmental activism today, they’ll wake up in a Venezuelan nightmare tomorrow. “There’s this new wave of Democrats that make Nancy Pelosi look moderate, and I never thought I’d see that day,” Representative Greg Walden, ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, told Politico, noting that even the House Speaker has distanced herself from A.O.C.’s environmental demands. “You see this Green New Deal rollout, you see [the] Medicare for all rollout, and you don’t see [Pelosi] buying into those proposals in any great embrace. I think it’s going to be important for the American people to understand the consequences of those proposals.”

Of course, Trump isn’t necessarily the political genius he imagines himself to be—and neither, for that matter, is McConnell. Though the latter has a track record of conniving legislative successes, he may have misjudged the perception of the Green New Deal beyond the conservative echo chamber. In fact, according to one recent poll, a majority of Americans from both parties say they support the deal—including 64 percent of all Republicans, and 57 percent of self-identified conservative Republicans. A second poll indicated that 43 percent of Americans are more open to raising taxes on carbon emissions to pay for the deal, compared to 38 percent who opposed the move. At this point, a show vote may inadvertently boost the Democrats McConnell intended to target. After all, they’re only reflecting an attitude that’s surprisingly pervasive—and one the president ignores at his peril.

More Great Stories from Vanity Fair

— The leaking, gossiping, and infighting that made Kellyanne Conway a formidable White House player

— Why old news habits must die—so that real journalism can live

— Nancy Pelosi is America’s most powerful power-suit boss

— Is Kamala Harris the 2020 candidate to beat?

— Your passport to Vanity Fair’s 25th Hollywood Issue with Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, Chadwick Boseman, and more

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.