Senate clears way to block clean air standards in California, including vehicle emission rules

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republicans on Wednesday voted to establish a new precedent that will allow them to roll back vehicle emission standards in California, including a rule phasing out the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.

The winding series of Senate procedural votes that went late into the evening could have profound implications for California’s longstanding efforts to reduce air pollution. It also established a new, narrow exception to the Senate filibuster even as Republicans have insisted that they won’t try to change Senate rules.

Democrats strongly objected to the move, delaying the votes for hours as Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., cleared the way procedurally for Republicans to bring up three House-passed resolutions that would block the rules. The Senate could pass the resolutions later this week.

At issue are the three California rules — phasing out gas-powered cars, cutting tailpipe emissions from medium- and heavy-duty vehicles and curbing smog-forming nitrogen oxide pollution from trucks.

Republicans say the phase out of gas-powered cars, along with the other rules, is costly for consumers and manufacturers, puts pressure on the nation’s energy grid and has become a de facto nationwide electric vehicle mandate. Democrats charge that Republicans are acting at the behest of the oil and gas industry and say that California should be able to set its own standards after obtaining waivers from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Thune said this week that the waivers “go far beyond the scope Congress contemplated in the Clean Air Act” and said they “endanger consumers, our economy and our nation’s energy supply.”

Also at issue is the Senate as an institution, and longstanding filibuster rules that both parties have rolled back over the last two decades. While the Republicans’ effort is narrow, it is one of several increasingly partisan efforts to push legislation through the Senate on party-line votes.

Through the series of votes Wednesday, Republicans set precedent for the Senate to reject the state EPA waivers with a simple majority vote. They made that move even after the Senate parliamentarian agreed with the Government Accountability Office that California’s policies are not subject to the Congressional Review Act, a law that allows Congress to reject federal regulations under certain circumstances.

“Republicans tonight cross a point of no return for the Senate, expanding what this chamber can do at a majority threshold,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor as he moved to delay the votes. He called the Republicans “fair-weather institutionalists.”

Both parties have made major moves to roll back the filibuster — which requires a 60-vote threshold — in recent years.

Democrats voted in 2013, under President Barack Obama, to lower the vote threshold to a simple majority for all presidential nominees, with the exception of the Supreme Court. In 2017, during President Donald Trump’s first term, Republicans rolled back the remaining filibuster rules to confirm Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, a rule that Democrats maintained in confirming Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2022. That same year, Democrats unsuccessfully attempted to roll back the legislative filibuster but were thwarted by some in their own party who opposed the move.

Republicans have argued this week that they are simply reinforcing Senate rules, and federal laws, that are already in place.

“We are not talking about doing anything to erode the institutional character of the Senate; in fact, we are talking about preserving the Senate’s prerogatives,” Thune said.

The votes to roll back California standards come after years of Republican efforts to block them. The Trump administration in 2019 revoked California’s ability to enforce its own emissions standards, but President Joe Biden later restored the state’s authority.

Republicans have argued that the rules effectively dictate standards for the whole country, imposing what would eventually be a nationwide electric vehicle mandate. Around a dozen states have already followed California’s lead.

California for decades has been given the authority to adopt vehicle emissions standards that are stricter than the federal government’s. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, announced plans in 2020 to ban the sale of all new gas-powered vehicles within 15 years as part of an aggressive effort to lower emissions from the transportation sector. Plug-in hybrids and used gas cars could still be sold.

The Biden administration approved the state’s waiver to implement the standards in December, a month before Trump returned to office. The California rules are stricter than a Biden-era rule that tightens emissions standards but does not require sales of electric vehicles.

Biden’s EPA said in announcing the decision that opponents of the California waivers did not meet their legal burden to show how either the EV rule or a separate measure on heavy-duty vehicles was inconsistent with the Clean Air Act.

Newsom has evoked Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who signed landmark environmental laws, as he has fought congressional Republicans and the Trump administration on the issue.

“The United States Senate has a choice: cede American car-industry dominance to China and clog the lungs of our children, or follow decades of precedent and uphold the clean air policies that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon fought so hard for,” he said this week.