The Senate on Thursday cleared three joint resolution that would nullify EPA waivers allowing California to enforce its own vehicle emissions standards, including one waiver that allowed the state to effectively phase out the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035.
The Senate passed, 51-44, a joint resolution that would block the EPA waiver issued in the final weeks of the Biden administration clearing California’s path to act on gasoline vehicles. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., joined all Republicans in backing the joint resolution under the Congressional Review Act.
The Senate also passed, 49-46, a joint resolution that would nullify a waiver to set stricter nitrogen oxide engine emissions standards and passed, 51-45, a joint resolution that would roll back a waiver to set stricter emissions standards on heavy-duty vehicles. No Democrats voted for either of those two resolutions.
The House passed the three joint resolutions in April and May, all with Democratic support. The White House said in a statement of administration policy that the president’s advisers would recommend that he sign all three into law.
California state officials criticized the votes.
“We need to hold the line on strong emissions standards and keep the waivers in place, and we will sue to defend California’s waivers,” Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.
“This Senate vote is illegal,” said Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. “Republicans went around their own parliamentarian to defy decades of precedent. We won’t stand by as Trump Republicans make America smoggy again — undoing work that goes back to the days of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan — all while ceding our economic future to China. We’re going to fight this unconstitutional attack on California in court.”
The CRA allows Congress to overturn agency rules and bars them from finalizing any that are “substantially the same.” The law also allows the Senate to take that action with a simple majority to avoid a potential filibuster.
The votes Thursday are the first time Congress has used the CRA to nullify waivers. Both the Government Accountability Office and Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough had found that waivers were not rules for the purposes of the CRA.
But in a series of party-line votes late Wednesday, the Senate adopted procedural changes that allow it to bring up the joint resolutions of disapproval under the CRA on a waiver. Republicans said their votes avoided breaking Senate precedent by overruling the parliamentarian, but Democrats, referring to the move as “going nuclear,” said it would drastically change how the chamber operates.
“It did not have to come to this. There were many ways around the procedural shortcut of going nuclear where a … majority of the Senate shoves its view on the minority without consideration,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said on the floor after the Wednesday votes. “That ought to be a last recourse for a desperate majority, but instead it was the first recourse because this is the easy way to do what the fossil fuel industry wants.”
Republicans say the vote on the joint resolutions protects federal jurisdiction over vehicle emissions standards. Noting that other Democrat-led states have voluntarily adopted California standards, the Republicans say the waiver allows California to effectively set national vehicle emissions standards.
Republicans also said California’s push toward electric vehicles would reduce jobs.
“These job losses will not be confined to California, but they will be spread all across the nation,” Senate Environment and Public Works Chair Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said on the Senate floor Wednesday night. “Workers in auto manufacturing, oil and gas production and the agriculture sector across this country would lose jobs because of California’s EV mandate, and the elected officials who represent Michigan auto workers, Nebraska corn farmers or West Virginia gas workers had no say in California and EPA’s decision.”
Groups including the Specialty Equipment Market Association, which represents aftermarket auto part manufacturers; and the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which counts Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and Stellantis NV, the maker of Chrysler vehicles, among its members, urged members of Congress to support the joint resolution on the zero-emissios vehicle standards.
The Clean Air Act, first passed in 1970 and subsequently amended, includes a section allowing the EPA to grant waivers that permit states to set their own standards, a carveout to address smog and other forms of pollution.
Congress initially provided California with the waiver authority because the state had demonstrated “compelling … circumstances sufficiently different” from the rest of the U.S. to justify more stringent vehicle emissions standards, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service. The EPA has issued more than 100 waivers since 1970 for California’s air and climate standards.
The California Air Resources Board — a panel first established by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan — is tasked with enforcing an array of state-level emission control standards. Other states can adopt California standards without a waiver if they meet certain criteria.
Republicans have previously voiced their opposition to the waiver provision. During the George W. Bush administration, the EPA rejected a California application for an emissions waiver, and during the first Trump administration the EPA revoked an emissions waiver for the state using administrative procedures.
But EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin took a different tack this time, transmitting the waivers to Congress in February and asking lawmakers to use the CRA to block them. Republicans said Zeldin’s move started the 60-legislative-day period for the CRA vote.
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