Senate Fight Over Gas-Powered Vehicles Is Also a Filibuster Showdown

Senate Republicans plan to move on Wednesday to overturn California’s landmark vehicle emissions law, using a little-known federal statute that allows Congress to strike down regulations and that Democrats claim would erode the filibuster.

The fight has serious implications for both environmental policy and the institution of the Senate. Republican leaders intend to use the statute, the Congressional Review Act, to force a vote to nullify federal waivers granted in the last days of the Biden administration to allow California to phase out gas-powered vehicles by 2035 and impose other emissions reductions.

They are acting even though the Government Accountability Office and their own Senate parliamentarian determined that the Environmental Protection Agency waivers were not subject to the review law, which is meant to give the legislative branch a way of undoing federal regulations, not state ones.

“Republicans seem to be putting the wealth of the big oil industry over the health of our constituents,” Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, said on Tuesday as he and other Democrats laid out their case against the Republican effort to undo his state’s emissions requirements.

Because resolutions of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act need only a majority vote, they are some of the only legislation that can avoid a filibuster in the Senate. Democrats have accused the Republicans of “going nuclear” on the California emissions standards. In the Senate, that refers to employing a simple majority to overrule precedents on issues that otherwise require a 60-vote supermajority under the filibuster.

Republican leaders dismissed the Democratic complaints. Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, who has vowed to protect the filibuster, said the dispute was over the “novel and narrow” issue of whether an E.P.A. waiver constituted a rule — not anything central to the future of the filibuster governing legislation.