Herschel Walker, the GOP nominee for a Georgia Senate seat, blasted a new law that’s aimed in part at fighting climate change, arguing it will waste money on trees.
“They continue to try to fool you like they’re helping you out, but they’re not,” Walker said Sunday at a Republican Jewish Coalition event in Sandy Springs, Georgia, days after President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. “They’re not helping you out because a lot of the money is going into trees. You know that, don’t you? It’s going into trees. We’ve got enough trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?”
Walker’s remarks, which came in response to a question about the measure, were first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The bill Biden signed will raise about $700 billion through corporate tax increases and prescription drug savings, and spend about $400 billion on clean energy and health care provisions.
Aug. 17, 202200:25
Walker stood by his remarks in a tweet Monday night.
“Yes, you heard me right,” Walker wrote on Twitter, saying Biden and his Democratic opponent in November, Sen. Raphael Warnock, “are spending $1.5 billion on ‘urban forestry.'”
The new law provides $1.5 billion in grants to state agencies and nonprofit organizations “for tree planting and related activities,” according to the bill text.
Will Kiley, a spokesperson for Walker’s campaign, told NBC News in an email that Walker “was commenting on how Raphael Warnock and Joe Biden spent billions of taxpayer dollars, in a recession, to do absolutely nothing to combat inflation and provide relief to hard-working Georgians.”
Walker was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, who largely dismissed climate change, but said that the United States would join the World Economic Forum’s initiative to plant and protect one trillion trees by 2030. In the final weeks of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order that established the One Trillion Trees Interagency Council.
The closely watched Senate race in Georgia is one of several where Republicans have nominated first-time candidates backed by Trump to run against seasoned Democratic politicians. Other states include Arizona, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., last week cited “candidate quality” when saying Republicans might not win control of the evenly split chamber in November. He did not name any specific candidates.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
