The Senate minority leader is livid at the Senate majority leader — and it’s all got to do with electric vehicles.
Majority Leader John Thune, a GOP leader from South Dakota, and his fellow Republican lawmakers are working to revoke policy from the administration of former President Joe Biden that would push an “electrical vehicle mandate … that will be in place almost across the entire country.”
Thune announced the move Tuesday.
“Most of the action this week is in the House of Representatives, but the Senate will be doing some important things this week,” Thune said.
“We are going to vote this week to do away with the Biden California mandate, which was an attempt by the Biden administration to impose [an] electric vehicle mandate across this country through the California Clean Air Act waiver, and so we’re going to be having that vote later this week,” he continued. “The impact of that particular rule would be devastating across our economy.
“And now California, by taking that action, another 17 or 18 states have been implicated, and essentially what you’ve got is an electrical vehicle mandate … that will be in place almost across the entire country.
“And so we will take action to undo that.”
“And obviously the Democrats are going to make a lot of noise about that, but the truth of the matter is this has nothing to do with the legislative filibuster.
“This is the Congress and the United States Senate submitting to the body the question of whether or not the Government Accountability Office — the GAO — ought to be able to determine for us what it is and isn’t a rule.
Should California’s EV mandate be repealed?
“The administration says it’s a rule, the GAO has said it’s not, and the United States Senate is going to be heard from on this issue tomorrow — and do something that will avoid, again, what I think and what a lot of people across this country think would be a catastrophic outcome, and that is an EV mandate that would be imposed across the United States.
“We have already repealed this year, through the Congressional Review Act, 14 burdensome Biden regulations, and that is what we will do with that issue, with the Biden California mandate, sometime later this week, probably tomorrow.”
The Trump-led GOP has been big on de-regulation and loosening up American ingenuity, so this move certainly aligns with the broader Republican game plan.
That being said, Thune nailed it on the head with his “Democrats are going to make a lot of noise”-remark, and it didn’t take long for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to cry foul.
“What goes around comes around,” Schumer said of Thune’s move, per Axios.
Apparently, Schumer and his fellow Democrats are considering this a “nuclear option,” despite even Thune’s own admission that the Congressional Review Act had been used recently to tackle those “14 burdensome Biden regulations,” to say nothing of the dozens of times it’s been used over the preceding decades.
“To go nuclear on something as significant as this, and to do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, is outrageous,” said Schumer — no stranger to impeding government work.
Thune responded to his Democratic counterparts by accusing them of merely “throwing a tantrum.”
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