The Senate repealed California’s de facto national EV mandate Thursday morning, delivering on a key pledge of President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to undo bans on gas-powered cars.
Senators voted 51 to 44 along party lines to approve a resolution sponsored by Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia that would rescind a Biden Environmental Protection Agency waiver allowing California and any state that adopts its vehicle emission standards to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035. The resolution passed the House on May 1 with 35 House Democrats supporting the EV mandate repeal and heads to Trump’s desk for signature.
Democratic Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who has a record of supporting some GOP-backed legislation, was the lone Senate Democrat to overturn California’s de facto EV mandate. Slotkin explained her break with Senate Democrats as an effort to preserve Michigan’s dominance in the automotive industry.
“Today, I voted to prevent California and the states that follow its standard from effectively banning gas-powered cars by 2035,” Slotkin said in a statement. “[A]s Michigan’s U.S. Senator, I have a special responsibility to stand up for the more than one million Michiganders whose livelihoods depend on the U.S. auto industry.”
The vehicle emission rule, dubbed the “Advanced Clean Cars II program,” effectively dictated national environmental policy given the state’s large share in the automobile market. Senate Republicans warned that failure to repeal California’s stringent vehicle emission standards would inflict negative economic consequences across the country.
“These job losses will not be confined to California, but they will be spread all across the nation,” Capito said in a speechon the Senate floor Wednesday evening. “Workers in auto manufacturing, oil and gas production, and the agriculture sector across this country would lose jobs because of California’s EV mandate, and the elected officials who represent Michigan auto workers, Nebraska corn farmers, or West Virginia gas workers had no say in California and EPA’s decision.”
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, who helped build the public case to nix the California waivers, cast the Senate’s vote as a fundamentalrejection of Democratic lawmakers’ Green New Deal proposal.
“Washington bureaucrats will not dictate the vehicles we can drive in Wyoming or across America,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming said in a statement following the vote. “Republicans rejected the Democrats’ delusional dream of banning gas-powered vehicles forever. We rejected their effort to force-feed electric vehicles to every single American. The electric vehicle mandate was a pillar of the Democrats’ Green New Deal. Today, Republicans toppled that pillar. The American people are back in the driver’s seat, exactly where they belong.”
Senate Republicans also rescinded California waivers mandating the sale of zero-emission trucks and effectively banning diesel engines Thursday.
The repeal of the waivers would not have happened if Senate GOP leadership had not orchestrated a procedural move Thursday night that allowed the Senate to consider the California waivers as eligible to be repealed under the Congressional Review Act.
Thune torched the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office in a floor speech on Tuesday for determining the waivers were not eligible for review under the CRA despite the Trump EPA submitting the waivers to Congress as rules.
“It’s an extraordinary deviation from precedent for an agency that should be defending Congress’ power instead of constraining it,” Thune said in his remarks.
Though Senate Democrats attempted to center their messaging around protecting the Senate procedure they previously voted or campaigned to eliminate, Thune framed the debate as defending the upper chamber’s constitutional authority to make law.
“I believe that when the Senate is facing a novel situation like this one, with disagreement among its members, it is appropriate for the Senate to speak as a body to the question — something the Senate does when questions over application of the rules arise,” Thune said on the floor Wednesday evening.
He also emphasized that Senate Republicans will preserve the legislative filibuster as long as they are serving in the majority. Thune’s defense of the filibuster is in sharp contrast to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer who has suggested that Democrats would kill the filibuster the next time they obtain a trifecta.
“I strongly suspect that they [Democrats] are attempting to use this situation as cover for destroying the filibuster the next time they’re in power,” Thune said Wednesday. “While Republicans are in charge, the legislative filibuster will remain in place. And you can take that to the bank.”
Trump frequently called for the repeal of all EV mandates during the 2024 presidential campaign. Capito vowed to rescind the de facto national EV mandate following the Biden administration’s issuance of a waiver in December 2024.
Senate Republicans have successfully repealed 17 Biden-era regulations, including the California waivers, under the Congressional Review Act thus far.
“We cannot thank Senators John Barrasso, Shelley Moore Capito and Leader John Thune enough for their leadership on this important issue,” American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers President and CEO Chet Thompson said in a statement following the vote on the EV mandate rule.
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