Earlier this year, when President Donald Trump was in a face-off with Democrats over a partial government shutdown due to providing funding for a border wall, he warned that he would issue an executive order declaring a national “emergency” in order to collect the resources necessary to build the wall. Media pundits on both Right and Left warned that, should Trump go through with this emergency declaration, it would set a precedent for a future Democrat president to declare a national emergency over, for example, climate change. Trump subsequently issued that executive order, which is currently tied up in the courts.

Well, that warning is arguably a reality as Democrat presidential candidate and Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT) has teamed up with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to introduce a joint resolution essentially saying that climate change is a national emergency requiring “a national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization of the resources and labor of the United States at a massive-scale.” At the same time, the resolution attempts to avoid claiming that it is a declaration of a national emergency: “Nothing in the concurrent resolution constitutes a declaration of a national emergency for purposes of … any special or extraordinary power.” What exactly constitutes an emergency to these two socialists is still unclear.

What is clear is that leftists are determined to use climate change as a convenient cudgel to force socialism onto the backs of Americans. The Wall Street Journal warns, “Conservatives who applaud Mr. Trump’s run around Congress should think again. Progressives will exploit the precedent for their own purposes.” True, but then again, “progressives” have a way of doing whatever they want without such niceties as precedent or legitimate authority. And most importantly, Trump’s EOs are almost all about removing statist extraconstitutional limitations and restrictions on the rights of the people, whereas, again, the Demo climate agenda is a massive charade to force adoption of their socialist agenda.