Politics

Dem Senators Want A $3 Million Earmark To Bring The Green New Deal To A Police Station

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Democratic Massachusetts Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren are pushing for a multi-million dollar earmark to facilitate an eco-friendly police station in a small town in their state.

The two lawmakers requested an earmark to the fiscal year 2024 Energy, Water and Development appropriations bill that would send $3 million in taxpayer funds to help build a “net-zero” emissions police station in Melrose, Massachusetts. Both senators have pushed for the “Green New Deal,” which proposes reorienting the federal government to spend enormous amounts of money to ditch fossil fuels, and both have also derided American law enforcement as fundamentally racist in the past.

“It’s OK to spend money on police systems, as long as that money is going towards causes that leftist activists are comfortable with, such as hypothetically reducing climate emissions,” David Ditch, a senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This is spending that does not do one thing to reduce crime.”

NEW: Two Dem lawmakers want to earmark $1m to help an activist org build an “environmental justice” center in NYC that is expected to mobilize thousands of voters annually via “non-partisan get-out-the-vote efforts.”@DailyCaller News Foundationhttps://t.co/ntkvFyt1f3

— Nick Pope (@realnickpope) December 21, 2023

Melrose’s new eco-friendly police station will replace its current facility, which “is functionally obsolete and in dire need of replacement,” according to Markey’s appropriations request. Melrose, which has a population of about 30,000 people, saw a total of 32 violent crimes in 2019, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics.

In the summer of 2020, as racially-charged protests and riots swept the country and calls for sweeping reform to American policing reached a fever pitch, Warren lamented “the systemic racism in our policing and justice systems,” while Markey called for “aggressive, restorative action to eliminate systemic racism” that manifests itself in some cases as “police officers [murdering] black and brown Americans in our streets without any accountability.”

Both senators have also pushed hard for a “Green New Deal” to fight climate change. The “Green New Deal” would authorize the federal government to spend massive amounts of money to rapidly transition the American economy away from fossil fuels, create job programs and reduce wealth inequality, according to the Sierra Club, an environmentalist organization that supports the policy.

The offices of Markey and Warren did not respond immediately to requests for comment.