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Ahead of a visit by democratic socialist and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to the White House on Friday, House lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning socialism, with dozens of Democrats joining Republicans in their McCarthyist fervor.
The resolution “denouncing the horrors of socialism” passed 285 to 98 on Friday morning, with 86 Democrats joining 199 Republicans in voting “yes.” Ninety-eight Democrats voted against the measure, while two voted “present.”
“Yes” votes included House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), who waited until the last minute to give a lukewarm endorsement of Mamdani earlier this month, despite Mamdani being the Democratic nominee.
The visit took place before President Donald Trump is slated to host Mamdani for a meeting at the White House on Friday afternoon. The meeting was a result of Mamdani’s office reaching out to the Trump administration, Mamdani said on Thursday, in hopes of working with the White House to lower costs for working people.
Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (Florida), the sponsor of the bill, named Mamdani in remarks on the House floor.
“I salute the president for receiving Mr. Mamdani because he won fair and square,” she said. “But let me just tell you something, knowing very well how Fidel [Castro] works and how Hugo Chavez works and how socialism works…. If it would have been the other way around, and Trump would have been the mayor-elect and Mamdani would have been the president of the United States, I assure you that there’s no way that Mamdani is going to receive Trump at the White House. Period.”
“And how do I know that? Because I know exactly how [socialists] operate,” she went on, ignoring the apparent circumstances surrounding the meeting.
At one point, debate on the resolution was derailed because Salazar attacked Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California), who spoke up against the resolution. For minutes, Salazar railed on Waters, saying she was a “friend” of late Cuban President Fidel Castro because Waters visited the country and spoke out against the U.S.’s embargo against Cuba.
Later, after Waters asked for Salazar’s words to be taken down, Salazar withdrew them from Congress’s record — but included the clip of her remarks in a post boasting about them on social media.
Waters criticized the resolution as “absolutely unnecessary,” and decried lawmakers for taking up the measure “instead of legislating and doing the work to tackle real problems that Americans face, like the skyrocketing cost of groceries” and health care crisis.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib later said on social media that the resolution was “pointless.”
“Clearly [House members] feel threatened by dem socialists like myself who are unbought & willing to take on the billionaire class,” she wrote. “To [Democratic Socialists of America] members across the country organizing every day to build more just communities: Thank you!”
The vote comes as the right is seeking to round up and punish left-wing dissidents, with the Trump administration labeling anti-capitalists and anti-fascists as “terrorists.”
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