WASHINGTON — The House passed a resolution denouncing the “horrors of socialism” Friday, hours before Democratic socialist New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was scheduled to meet President Trump at the White House.
The concurrent resolution, introduced by Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), passed the lower chamber in a bipartisan, 285-98 vote.
All the “no” votes came from Democrats, two of whom also voted “present.”
“Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States,” the resolution stated. Salazar’s parents fled Cuba following the takeover of Communist dictator Fidel Castro.
Some members of Congress who endorsed Mamdani are proud socialists, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and “Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
The vote took place shortly after Mamdani touched down at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport ahead of the scheduled 3 p.m. sitdown with Trump.
The 34-year-old has expressed a desire to “speak plainly” to the Republican president about how to make New York City more affordable.
Trump previously threatened to cut the city’s federal funding if “my little Communist” was elected. On Friday, however, the president told Fox News Radio’s “Brian Kilmeade Show” that he expected the meeting to be “quite civil.”
“I think we’ll get along fine,” Trump added.
“I have many disagreements with the president, and I believe that we should be relentless and pursue all avenues and all meetings that could make our city affordable for every single New Yorker,” Mamdani said at a City Hall Park news conference on Thursday.
“Let me educate our colleagues on the other side of the aisle: Socialism is communism-light,” Staten Island Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) said during floor debate Friday.
Malliotakis noted that her mother had fled Cuba in 1959 to avoid “the very things that our new socialist mayor in New York City says he wants. A socialist who says he wants to seize the means of production; he wants to abolish private property rights; he wants government-run supermarkets.
“But guess what, my friends? Those are policies straight out of the Communist playbook of Karl Marx,” she added. “So there is no difference between socialism and communism, and where these policies were tried, yes, they failed.”
Salazar, Malliotakis and other members also called out the more recent failures of socialism in Venezuela.
The resolution’s text cited how socialist regimes have historically “collapsed into communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships” — including those of Russia’s Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin, China’s Mao Zedong, Cuba’s Fidel Castro — “led to famine and mass murders.”
In North Korea, for example, the resolution noted that as many as 3.5 million people have starved under the rule of strongman Kim Jong Un; 10 million “were sent to the gulags in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”; and “between 15,000,000 and 55,000,000 people starved to death in the wake of famine and devastation caused by the Great Leap Forward in China.”
A companion resolution in the Senate was introduced by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.).
Both resolutions were submitted in early September, weeks before the New York City mayoral election but after Mamdani had won the Democratic primary.
