Dem
47
GOP
53
A little over a week ago, we had a very inside baseball item about how Republican senators were considering overruling both the Government Accountability Office and Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, and to declare that all decisions made by the EPA (and other federal agencies) count as "rules" and so can be overturned by a simple majority vote in both chambers, under the terms of the Congressional Review Act.
Yesterday, presumably taking advantage of the cover afforded by all the coverage of the budget bill, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) staged a complicated sequence of votes that did not technically overrule MacDonough, apparently, but that did produce the result that the Senate can treat executive agency decisions as rules, and to strike them down with a simple majority. The maneuvering is so weedy that none of the reporters on the scene could really explain it clearly. But here's what Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said afterward: "What I didn't want to do was to vote to overturn the parliamentarian, and with help from a lot of experts the leader came up with an approach that avoids that outcome."
This strikes us as a distinction without a difference, even if it did address Collins' "concerns." Arcane elements of parliamentary procedure, including the decisions of the Parliamentarian, are inside baseball enough that there's no way they become political issues for most voters. So, Thune trickery or no, the GOP will get away with it on that level. Meanwhile, if the net result is to "sidestep" MacDonough, that is close enough to overruling her that the Democrats are going to feel justified in doing some "sidestepping" of their own, once they are back in the majority. They are going to strike down a few executive agency decisions, too.
Meanwhile, the proximate cause of all this maneuvering was a desire to revoke the waiver that the EPA gave to California, to allow the Golden State to establish more-strict-than-federal emissions standards. California AG Rob Bonta (D) has already announced he will sue; this will bring the number of suits he's filed against the administration to an even two dozen. So, this is going to be tied up in legal knots for a while. Maybe California will win, maybe it will lose, but in the end, the auto manufacturers have no choice but to read the tea leaves, thinking not only about the next 3 years, but also the next 30, and not only about the United States, but also the whole world. And for that reason, California is ultimately going to win, even if it loses in court (see below for more). (Z)