WASHINGTON — The Home handed a decision denouncing the “horrors of socialism” Friday, hours earlier than Democratic socialist New York Metropolis Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was scheduled to satisfy President Trump on the White Home.
The concurrent decision, launched by Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), handed the decrease chamber in a bipartisan, 285-98 vote.
All of the “no” votes got here from Democrats, two of whom additionally voted “current.”
“Congress denounces socialism in all its varieties, and opposes the implementation of socialist insurance policies in the US,” the decision acknowledged. Salazar’s dad and mom fled Cuba following the takeover of Communist dictator Fidel Castro.
Some members of Congress who endorsed Mamdani are proud socialists, together with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and “Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
The vote occurred shortly after Mamdani touched down at Ronald Reagan Washington Nationwide Airport forward of the scheduled 3 p.m. sitdown with Trump.
The 34-year-old has expressed a want to “communicate plainly” to the Republican president about learn how to make New York Metropolis extra inexpensive.
Trump beforehand threatened to chop the town’s federal funding if “my little Communist” was elected. On Friday, nonetheless, the president advised Fox Information Radio’s “Brian Kilmeade Present” that he anticipated the assembly to be “fairly civil.”
“I believe we’ll get alongside tremendous,” Trump added.
“I’ve many disagreements with the president, and I imagine that we ought to be relentless and pursue all avenues and all conferences that would make our metropolis inexpensive for each single New Yorker,” Mamdani stated at a Metropolis Corridor Park information convention on Thursday.
“Let me educate our colleagues on the opposite aspect of the aisle: socialism is communism-light,” Staten Island Rep. Nicole Malliotakis stated throughout flooring debate Friday.”
Malliotakis famous that her mom had fled Cuba in 1959 to keep away from “the very issues that our new socialist mayor in New York Metropolis says he desires. A socialist who says he desires to grab the technique of manufacturing; he desires to abolish personal property rights; he desires government-run supermarkets.
“However guess what, my mates? These are insurance policies straight out of the Communist playbook of Karl Marx,” she added. “So there isn’t any distinction between socialism and communism, and the place these insurance policies have been tried, sure, they failed.”
Salazar, Malliotakis and different members additionally referred to as out the newer failures of socialism in Venezuela.
The decision’s textual content cited how socialist regimes have traditionally “collapsed into communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships” — together with these of Russia’s Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin, China’s Mao Zedong, Cuba’s Fidel Castro — “led to famine and mass murders.”
In North Korea, for instance, the decision famous that as many as 3.5 million folks have starved beneath the rule of strongman Kim Jong Un; 10 million “have been despatched to the gulags within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”; and “between 15,000,000 and 55,000,000 folks starved to loss of life within the wake of famine and devastation attributable to the Nice Leap Ahead in China.”
A companion decision within the Senate was launched by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.)
Each resolutions have been submitted in early September, weeks earlier than the New York Metropolis mayoral election however after Mamdani had received the Democratic main.
