Republicans Just Killed California's E.V. Mandate. Will They Regret It?
The vote could set a dangerous precedent and empower progressive policymaking in the future.
As the House of Representatives has been debating its one big, beautiful bill this week, the Senate has been considering a contentious vote of its own.
On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R–S.D.) said that the Senate would move forward with a vote over three Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions—a law that allows Congress to overturn federal rules with a simple majority—to rescind air pollution regulations in California.
Under the Clean Air Act, states are not allowed to set their own vehicle air pollution standards, except California, which must request a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) before implementing new rules. While states can't set their own rules, they are allowed to adopt California's and, as of 2025, 17 states and the District of Columbia have done so.
In the final days of the Biden administration, the EPA granted California exemptions for a rule that requires 100 percent of car sales in the state to come from zero-emission vehicles by 2035 and two others that set strict emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles.
On Thursday, the Senate voted 51–44 to overturn these EPA waivers. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D–Mich.) was the only Democrat to vote with Republicans, but identical measures recently passed the House of Representatives with broader bipartisan support.
While Republican opposition to the waivers is not surprising, the use of the CRA has stoked a debate about Senate rules which could have implications for future policymaking.
In March, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said these waivers were not rules "for purposes of CRA" and thus the CRA could not be used to overturn California's regulations. Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, the nonpartisan official in charge of interpreting Senate rules, deferred to the GAO and ruled that these resolutions would need to pass with 60 votes.
Senate Republicans still moved forward and were able to pass the CRA resolutions with a simple majority by "effectively kicking the question about what qualifies under the Congressional Review Act back to the Senate to determine," reports Politico.
The Senate has overruled the parliamentarian only a handful of times. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D–R.I.) said that with this vote, Republicans "violated the plain text of the Congressional Review Act, changed the Clean Air Act, and broke the filibuster."
Darren Baskt, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), disagrees, telling Reason, "This whole issue is about some Senators wanting to ban gas-powered cars. The procedural argument has been a desperate ploy to ensure California and its blue state allies can reshape the nation's car and truck industry."
CEI recently sent a letter co-authored by Baskt to the Senate, which argued that the CRA is exempt from the filibuster and the parliamentarian was never authorized to interpret these resolutions in the first place.
"The Congressional Review Act establishes a process around the filibuster, and the Senate is merely using the CRA as it was designed," says Baskt. "To stress, the entire issue is narrow in scope and limited to CRA resolutions, which are distinct from regular legislative business. It is not an attack on the filibuster, and if it were, I'd be objecting to the action."
Philip Rossetti, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, tells Reason that "if the CRA can't be used on a waiver then Congress' role in overseeing regulations would be substantially lessened." For instance, the executive branch could begin to issue waivers instead of federal rules to skirt CRA oversight.
While Senate Republicans might be within their legal rights to move forward with the CRA, it could start a dangerous precedent. In 2021, MacDonough nixed the Democrat's plan to include a federal minimum wage increase in the American Rescue Plan. If the parliamentarian's word doesn't matter (or matters less), what's to stop Democrats from attaching unrelated policies to large spending bills in the future?
There are also other ways to overturn California's waivers without using the CRA. The president could use the Administrative Procedures Act to claw back the waivers, which would take about a year to complete. But "that's a big concern because affected industries need to know sooner rather than later if they need to make investments today to comply with future regulatory requirements," according to Rossetti.
Ultimately, the issue stems "from the fact that the president has a lot of regulatory power, and Congress has very little oversight," says Rossetti. For instance, former President Joe Biden was able to "implement almost two trillion dollars of regulatory costs without needing any buy-in from the public."
While E.V. mandates are harmful and expensive, it's worth wondering if Republicans made the right decision overturning these waivers through the CRA and if the decision will hurt them in the future.
Whitehouse seems to think so. "Make no mistake, Democrats will not forget this, and Republicans will rue this day," he warned.
