Media activists on both sides of the aisle have been foaming at the mouth about an interview Cornell University Law School Professor Robert Hockett did with Tucker Carlson on Fox News last week. In it, he claimed there was nothing from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ camp that referred to paying people who were “unwilling to work.”
Leftist media cheered Hockett for “fact-checking” Carlson. Conservative media called him a liar when it was clear the claim was posted and later removed from her website. As it turned out, neither was fully correct.
The version that was posted and removed from her government website was a draft. In this draft, they included language that people who were unable or unwilling to work would be paid by the government, but that’s apparently not what was actually being proposed in the Green New Deal.
At least not yet.
My Take
If it’s in the draft, and multiple people were involved in putting the draft together, certainly the notion of paying people who are unwilling to work was under discussion. Perhaps most in her camp believed it should be removed since it’s about the most unAmerican notion a politician could ever conceive of, but it was slipped in and published nonetheless.
Hockett seems deeply invested in making this idea as palatable as possible and having proposals to reward people simply for being lazy and letting hard-working Americans pay for their laziness isn’t ideal for their case. We impatiently wait for the final draft.
