Senate Republicans will move this week to nix California’s vehicle emission waivers, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said, setting up a high-stakes fight over the chamber’s rules.
Thune said in a Tuesday floor speech that he will move forward with three House-passed resolutions that use the Congressional Review Act to roll back EPA waivers that effectively let California set its own emission standards. Thune’s announcement comes after weeks of internal deliberations within the conference and public pressure from members of his leadership team to hold a vote.
That’s because the Government Accountability Office has found that the California waivers aren’t a rule and thus aren’t subject to the CRA, which allows Congress to nix regulations with only a simple majority, bypassing the threat of a Democratic filibuster. Crucially, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has backed up that finding.
Democrats have warned GOP leaders that they view moving forward with the disapproval resolution over MacDonough’s guidance to be akin to deploying the “nuclear option” undermining the filibuster.
Thune declined after his speech to detail how Republicans will get the resolution to a final vote, saying that it’s still a “little early.” Several GOP senators acknowledged this week that they were working through “options.” He and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) met with four potential GOP swing votes on Monday night — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John Curtis of Utah and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana — to talk about the procedural mechanics of the resolution.
It’s unclear how Democrats will respond after issuing their dire warnings. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) announced Tuesday that he would slow-walk four EPA nominees in response to Republicans pursuing the disapproval resolutions.
“If my Republican colleagues open this door and overturn the Parliamentarian’s wise safeguards on this type of abuse, there would be no practical limit, and the Senate could be forced to vote repeatedly on such matters that are clearly not ‘rules’ notwithstanding the plain language of the CRA,” Padilla said in a statement.
Republicans have brushed off criticism by noting that most Senate Democrats previously voted unsuccessfully to create a separate exception to the 60-vote legislative filibuster.
“I don’t believe that it’s nuking the filibuster,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), criticizing Democrats who previously voted for a civil-rights carve-out now raising a “hue and cry about nuking the filibuster.”
Still, multiple GOP senators have raised questions privately about if sidestepping the parliamentarian would be weakening their own chamber’s rules and setting a precedent about what qualifies under the Congressional Review Act that would come back to bite them the next time Democrats are in power.
But GOP leadership and supporters of the resolution are trying to turn the internal debate from the parliamentarian, whom many of them are wary of openly defying, to the role of the Government Accountability Office. Some have accused the agency of making a politically motivated decision.
Collins, after the meeting in Thune’s office, said that senators were still discussing the procedural path for the resolution but added that “I definitely want to see the rule overturned.”
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