Senate Democrats are vowing that Republicans will face consequences over their decision to hold a vote to nix California’s emission standard waivers — even after receiving non-binding guidance from the chamber’s parliamentarian that those waivers didn’t qualify for reversal under the Congressional Review Act process.
The rhetorical warning shots come after Majority Leader John Thune announced that Republicans, after weeks of internal party deliberations, would officially move forward with floor votes on three disapproval resolutions to eliminate the Biden-era EPA waivers that effectively let California set its own emission standards.
“It’s going nuclear plain and simple, it’s overruling the parliamentarian,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters. “What goes around, comes around.”
Republicans haven’t yet outlined what procedural hurdles they will need to clear to get the resolutions to final votes of adoption on Wednesday. The Government Accountability Office concluded the waivers didn’t qualify for repeal under the CRA, which lets Congress overturn certain administration rules with a simple majority threshold in the Senate within a certain window of time. The Senate parliamentarian backed the GAO up in its findings.
But Republicans — and a handful of Democrats — are vehemently opposed to the waivers, saying they are overly burdensome and unrealistic. The House went ahead and voted to repeal the waivers with CRA resolutions in recent weeks with some Democratic support.
Democrats are warning, though, that moving forward now in repealing the waivers through the CRA in the Senate will be akin to deploying the “nuclear option,” a term both parties use for changing the Senate’s rules, and which will come back to bite Republicans when they are back in the minority.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said Tuesday that if Republicans proceed, “they should expect that a future Democratic government will have to revisit decades worth of paltry corporate settlements, deferred prosecution agreements, and tax rulings.”
“These partisan actions cut both ways,” Wyden added.
Democrats are also privately strategizing over more immediate consequences for Republicans, though they haven’t yet specified what those would look like as they wait to see how Republicans will try to get the disapproval resolutions to final votes.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), for instance, announced Tuesday that he will slow-walk four EPA nominees and more actions could be in the offing.
“There’s a growing list of potential CRAs that we may bring, and we don’t have to wait until we’re back in the majority to bring them. There are some CRAs that we would likely bring in the coming weeks, months, if Republicans go through with this,” Padilla said in a brief interview, though he declined to talk specifically about Trump administration actions Democrats might try to undo.
Republicans, for their part, have hinted they want to keep the Senate’s focus on the role of the GAO rather than the parliamentarian, who many in the GOP ranks are wary of directly defying.
Elizabeth MacDonough, the parliamentarian, confirmed Tuesday through a GOP senator presiding over the chamber floor that she had advised leadership offices that the disapproval resolutions didn’t qualify for reversal under the CRA.
Still, Republicans have bristled over Democratic protests that they are undercutting the legislative filibuster, noting that nearly every Democrat voted during the Biden administration on an unsuccessful attempt to create a carve-out to lower the threshold for voting rights legislation.
Democrats have cast the move by Republicans to ignore the parliamentarian as a warning sign they could be willing to flout her on other things, too — like what policies can and can’t be included in the GOP’s party-line tax and spending package that could be coming over from the House as soon as this week.
“The only people who have attempted to get rid of the legislative filibuster are the Democrats,” Thune said. “Every single one of them up there that’s popping up and spotting off has voted, voted literally, to get rid of the legislative filibuster. This is a novel and narrow issue that deals with the government accountability office.”
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