A French member of European Parliament made headlines on Sunday when he said it was time for the United States to return the Statue of Liberty to France because America no longer deserves it, drawing return fire from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who essentially said ‘no way!’

“We’re going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: ‘Give us back the Statue of Liberty,’” Raphael Glucksmann said to a meeting of his relatively small, center-left Place Publique party in Paris.

Ever since 1886, the 305-foot copper statue has towered over the entrance New York’s harbor as a symbol of American freedom. “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” reads the Emma Lazarus poem ‘The New Colossus’ that has come to be the statue’s motto. Sculpted by Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, the statue was a gift from the people of France to the U.S.

“My advice to that unnamed low-level French politician would be to remind them that it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now,” she said in a briefing Monday. “So they should be very grateful to our great country.”

Glucksmann, 45, is the son of French “public intellectual” Andre Glucksmann and has been outspoken in French politics mainly on issues outside of France. Prior to becoming a Socialist-allied politician in his home country, he worked as an advisor to the former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, who is currently incarcerated in a prison hospital in that small, South Caucasus nation.

The French gadfly suggested that researchers and scientists whose federal funding has been frozen by the U.S. government would be welcome in France. His suggestion that America return the gift to its long-time ally marks the high point in his exposure in the American media to date.

As for the Statue of Liberty, Leavitt made clear in the White House briefing earlier this week that is will remain where it stands.