A comprehensive energy bill that lawmakers wanted to send to the president by now is being bogged down by House amendments that the White House hates.
This has environmental activists up in arms, pleading that the Senate not agree to conference the major energy package unless all GOP-backed riders are removed.
The Senate had passed the bipartisan energy bill on the floor in April. The House took it up and added a number of new provisions from bills the White House had threatened to veto earlier in the year.
The House and Senate are seeking to come together in a formal conference committee under the rules of “regular order” to combine the two versions of the bill and send it to the president’s desk.
But the House amendments have stoked weeks of deliberations over whether the bill is still viable with the new measures attached.
The environmental community told senators Wednesday the bill should not be conferenced, and lawmakers must resist passing a bill with so many controversial riders.
“The House-passed amendment would undoubtedly take our country down the wrong track and contains so many controversial and problematic provisions it is impossible to see how agreement could be found,” a coalition of green groups wrote in a letter to lawmakers, including the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“Rejecting a conference with the current House offer is essential to protect against harm to our environment,” they argue.
The measures have delayed the Senate from taking the step the House did last month of designating conferees to come together to conference the bill.
Senior aides on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee say they will continue to press for a conference even if it takes going into the lame duck session of Congress after the November elections.
But Democratic resistance to the House measures is making that increasingly difficult.
The Chamber of Commerce, along with other energy trade groups, last week sent letters to the Senate, pleading that they conference the bill.
The controversial new measures adopted by the House include bills that the lower chamber passed earlier in the year, including a measure to expedite energy development on tribal lands, a controversial drought bill, a sportsmen bill that would increase hunters access to public lands, and other measures that the White House has said it firmly opposes and would veto.
