Those looking for a preview of energy legislation that might pass a Republican-controlled Senate should keep their eyes on the House this week.
House Republicans are putting a package of energy bills up for a vote, but they have already earned a veto threat from the White House. They will pass the House, and then they will all stop dead in the Democratic-held Senate. But the hope for Republicans is that the congressional calculus will change come January.
“The American energy revolution has been one of the lone bright spots in an otherwise beleaguered economy. But despite this abundance, the Obama administration is relentless in their pursuit to crowd out low-cost energy options by mandating regulations that favor expensive and unreliable energy sources,” says an entry on House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s, R-Calif., website.
The House bills, which were all filed as H.R. 2, are standard Republican fare.
One would block rules governing hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on federal lands. Another would prohibit regulations that “cause significant adverse effects to the economy” which, in this instance, would apply to key Environmental Protection Agency rules on power plant emissions. More federal land, both onshore and offshore, would open to drilling under a separate measure. The last would effectively bar the EPA’s proposed carbon rule for existing power plants from going into effect.
Some top GOP priorities that would likely clear a Republican-held Senate have already passed the House this session. Those include faster green-lighting of liquefied natural gas exports and approving the Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL pipeline. Opening public lands to more drilling and scuttling EPA carbon emission rules all would likely top the agenda of a GOP-controlled Congress.
All would have a chance of snagging the filibuster-proof 60 votes needed for passage.
And all would likely get vetoed by President Obama. But Republicans are relishing the potential chance to put Obama on the spot.
“I think we can get 60 votes on a lot of those things. And then the president will have to decide does he really care about the American economy and American workers, or is he just stuck to his radical, extreme environmental ideology?” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told the Washington Examiner.
Perhaps a prelude to aligning agendas between the chambers, Sens. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and Joe Donnelly, a centrist Democrat from Indiana, introduced companion legislation Tuesday to House-passed legislation that would change federal reviews for cross-border energy infrastructure projects. Such a measure would seek to avoid another Keystone XL-style delay — the project has been in administrative limbo for nearly six years.
But Obama has staked much political capital on his climate change and environmental agenda, which he is implementing largely through executive action. The administration, as the Office of Management and Budget noted in its statement on the House energy package, will reject attempts to roll any of that back.
“H.R. 2 is a reiteration of various bills that previously have been voted on by the House during this Congress, including several for which the administration has issued Statements of Administration Policy strongly opposing the bills and stating that, if presented to the president, his senior advisers would recommend that he veto them,” OMB said.
That won’t stop Republicans from trying.
“Yes, we need willing partners in the Senate and the White House, and I believe that come next year, the time will be right to get these policies moving,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said during a July speech.
But don’t expect a GOP Senate to pass “crazy” bills, said Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican poised to helm the Energy and Natural Resources Committee if her party wins the majority.
“We have an interest in passing legislation that gets signed by this administration,” Dillon told the Examiner.
While there’s agreement among Republicans on many energy issues, some are trickier.
Whether Senate Republicans would advocate solely for the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada as the nation’s lone nuclear waste dump is hazy.
House Republicans have laid their markers down on that — they say that Yucca must be the site to comply with a 1982 federal law. But Murkowski, along with Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., has pushed an alternative that would allow other communities to apply to host the nation’s nuclear waste.
Removing the 39-year-old restrictions on exporting crude oil also might wait, Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in response to a question from the Examiner. It’s a newer discussion, and a majority of Americans think sending oil abroad would raise gasoline prices — even though several studies suggest it won’t.
“I think the oil exports are definitely on the table. It’s a little more complicated, and I think we need to get everybody to the table to work our way through that. But I think we ought to have a robust debate,” Cornyn said.
