Even for those who closely follow federal environmental regulations, this week’s Senate meshugas is a bit confusing. What is clear is that Republicans’ decision to steamroll over ordinary procedure could have sweeping consequences for California, the U.S. auto industry, and the Senate itself. In the coming years, it might also cost the party dearly.
That’s not because California in the 1960s was particularly environmentalist—after all, that very same decade, it made Ronald Reagan its governor. Rather, it’s because its air quality was particularly bad. To this day, California’s heavy dependence on cars and its sizable industry make it smoggy; parts of the state have some of the country’s worst air quality. The transportation sector there—including commercial trucks and passenger vehicles—is responsible for 80 percent of smog-forming nitrous oxide pollution and 50 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions.
The Biden administration approved waivers for California’s Advanced Clean Car II program, the Advanced Clean Trucks rule, and the Omnibus Nox rule, to limit ozone pollution from trucks. These regulations—especially provisions to phase out the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035—have sparked outrage from the fossil fuel interests that have the ear of Trump world, including automakers and oil and gas companies that donated generously to his campaign. Red-state attorneys general and industry groups sued over California’s clean car rules last year, and the Supreme Court has signaled that it’ll hear their case. The oil industry doesn’t like California’s Clean Air Act powers “because most clean vehicles use less gas, and they want to sell more gas,” explained Dan Becker, the director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign. “The auto industry doesn’t like it because they don’t want to make clean vehicles. They want to make gas guzzlers.”
Those investments have paid off. Rather than going through the standard, somewhat lengthy process to withdraw California’s approvals, as the first Trump administration did, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin proposed doing so with the Congressional Review Act. Since 1996, the CRA has allowed governments to rescind federal rules put in place during the last six months of the previous administration. So-called CRA disapproval resolutions can be passed through the Senate with a simple majority rather than the 60 votes that are typically required to push bills through that body. They also aren’t subject to judicial review, and prevent “substantially similar” rules from being published in the future. The problem for Republicans is that the waiver approvals in question aren’t themselves rules but rather administrative actions. They also apply specifically to California and whatever states also choose to adopt the rules the EPA approves. The Congressional Review Act explicitly excludes rules of “particular applicability” from its disapprovals process.
In deciding to ignore the Senate Parliamentarian and rescind California’s waivers with a simple majority vote, Senate Republicans have indeed gone “nuclear,” although they are attempting to dress it up as something else. Senate Majority Leader John Thune argued in January that overriding the parliamentarian’s guidance would be “akin to killing the filibuster.” He’s repeatedly insisted that the fight over California’s waivers from the EPA is just that, and “not about destroying Senate procedure or any other hysterical claim Democrats are making.” Several members of his own caucus, however—including Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins—were themselves wary of a direct confrontation with the parliamentarian and eroding the filibuster. Thune won them over by setting up a series of complicated procedural votes that would pose the confrontation indirectly instead, putting the question of whether California’s waivers are indeed eligible for disapproval using the CRA in front of the Senate rather than relying on the parliamentarian’s decision.
Freed to call all manner of administrative actions into question, the GOP, Becker said, is likely to “get a bad case of bloodlust and look around to see what else the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 have put in the index for elimination.” Everything from vaccine and contraceptive approvals to broadcast licenses for media outlets that are critical of Trump could be on the chopping block, as California’s senator Alex Padilla has argued. Should Democrats take back the government, they’d in turn have an easier time undoing the Trump administration’s actions like corporate merger approvals, and accomplishing more of their legislative priorities with a simple majority.
These aren’t just far-off theoretical possibilities. Just before the Senate vote, Republicans passed their “One Big, Beautiful Bill” through the House. In addition to gutting Medicaid, repealing large parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, and lowering taxes for the wealthy, that package includes provisions to throw out fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions standards put in place by the Biden administration, and institute a 10-year ban moratorium on state-level AI regulation. Bills passed through budget reconciliation, however—and by a simple majority—have to relate to raising or spending revenue, or changing the debt limit; those parts don’t. House Republicans, who aren’t subject to those rules, may have included those sections expecting them to be stripped out by the Senate. They still could be, but the Senate has just proved its willingness to bend the rules.
Intentionally or not, Republicans and their donors picked a clever vehicle by which to grant themselves—and Democrats—more power under the Congressional Review Act. California’s motor vehicle regulations are a relatively niche topic even among committed climate wonks. The Congressional Review Act is an obscure law that most people probably don’t realize exists. Whatever small number of Americans pay attention to Congress have probably been tracking budget negotiations. The barrier to entry for understanding the importance of what the Senate just did is exceedingly high. Having successfully stuck it to California, maybe the GOP will now dutifully follow the GAO and the parliamentarian’s guidance on budget reconciliation and not include any sweeping, extraneous language to overturn federal regulations or prevent states from regulating the AI developers that donate generously to them. Maybe they won’t see today’s vote as a permission slip to go hunting for actions they don’t like, or find creative ways to sneak more of their legislative goals into measures that only require a simple majority of votes to pass. But they’ve certainly made all of that—and a fundamental transformation of the Senate—seem a lot more likely.
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