WATCH: Chuck Schumer Used ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ to Sell Obamacare

President Joe Biden joined the “cancel culture” this week by dropping Dr. Seuss from “Read Across America Day” after left-wing critics complained about the author’s early caricatures and race-neutral beliefs. But Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who leads the Democratic Party in the Senate, is among the many members of his party who have used Dr. Seuss to make political points. In 2013, for example, Schumer used Dr. Seuss to argue for the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.

Schumer cited the popular Dr. Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham, which Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) had read aloud on the Senate floor as he attempted to block the implementation of Obamacare. Schumer argued that like the central character in Green Eggs and Ham, who resisted the dish until he actually tried it, Americans would enjoy Obamacare once they were forced to enroll in it:

I was also surprised that he used the book Green Eggs and Ham as he read to his daughters. Because anyone who knows that book knows that the moral of that book I: try something before you condemn it. You might actually like it! The main character in Green Eggs and Ham resisted eating green eggs and ham. Maybe if he were a Senator he’d speak on the floor for 21 hours. But then, when he tasted green eggs and ham, he actually liked them. Maybe, Senator Cruz, as the president’s health care bill goes into effect, you may actually find that you, and your constituents, actually like it.

(Cruz failed, but the Obamacare website, healthcare.gov, went on to crash immediately upon the launch of the new policy.)

Other Democrats have used Dr. Seuss to illustrate political points, drawing on the author’s conventionally liberal beliefs.

In 2014, for example, when Democrats took a page from Cruz’s book and held an all-night talkathon to urge action on climate change, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) read from Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, a popular book with environmental themes:

The business that cares for Dr. Seuss’s legacy announced this week that it would no longer be publishing six of his earliest works.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.