Republicans will try to drastically handicap President Obama’s environmental agenda Tuesday in what promises to be a budget battle with the White House.
House lawmakers are trying to block a number of Obama’s regulations through the House Interior and Environment spending bill for fiscal 2016: proposed limits on power plant carbon emissions, an expansion of Environmental Protection Agency jurisdiction over waterways and potentially tighter standards on the amount of ground-level ozone, or smog, allowed in the atmosphere.
Republicans acknowledge they won’t be able to slide all those measures by the president. Nixing power plant emissions limits is unlikely to succeed, given that it forms the centerpiece of Obama’s climate agenda and stakes his claim as an international leader heading into United Nations talks that begin in late November in Paris. But Republicans are still hopeful to get the rule scrapped.
“Today in a vacuum, sure, but what are the circumstances of that broader negotiation?” a senior GOP source told the Examiner.
Republicans must decide which policy “riders” they can part with, but they’re in a strong position to negotiate with Obama now that they control both chambers of Congress. The spending bill, which the House Appropriations Committee will weigh in a hearing just as the Senate Appropriations Interior and Environment Subcommittee begins marking up its version, highlights that new dynamic.
“They’re probably going to have to take some, but the question is which some are they going to take? And nobody knows the answer to that,” Mike McKenna, a GOP operative who lobbies for energy companies, told the Washington Examiner.
Democrats and environmental groups hate all the measures proposed in the House bill, as well as others such as one rider that would prevent the Interior Department from listing the greater sage grouse as an endangered species. Green groups have highlighted 20 riders they want removed from the Interior and Environment spending bill.
“We are alarmed that this bill has once again become a target for anti-environmental and superfluous policy provisions, which have no place in the appropriations process,” a coalition of more than three dozen environmental and conservation groups said last week in a letter to top Republican and Democratic committee members.
But those groups, with Democrats and the Obama administration, also dislike the spending levels proposed in the spending bill under the sequestration caps. The bill would fund the EPA and Interior at $30.17 billion, a reduction of $246 million below current levels and $3 billion below Obama’s request. EPA spending would decrease $718 million, or 9 percent.
Some environmental groups, given the GOP-controlled Congress, said blocking the riders was more important than reaching the spending levels desired by Democrats and their allies.
“This is all a floor show in preparing for an expected omnibus fight in September and the hope is to strengthen the White House’s hand while at the same time reminding them that good funding levels and an end to sequester are not a good trade for riders that shatter our bedrock environmental protections,” Lukas Ross, Friends of the Earth climate and energy campaigner, told the Examiner in an email.
It’s possible that the spending bills will be combined in a large omnibus package hammered out among congressional leadership and spending committee chiefs with some level of White House involvement. Another alternative is Congress might pass a continuing resolution to maintain current funding levels. Regardless, the Interior and Environment bill will play a significant role given how much the climate and environmental issues mean to Obama’s legacy.
That Obama is looking toward climate as a way to leave a lasting imprint on the presidency almost assures he would resist any measure to scuttle the power plant rule, Dave Banks, a former longtime GOP Capitol Hill aide who now is executive vice president with free-market group the American Council for Capital Formation, told the Examiner.
“I think in the lead-up to [Paris] I don’t know how the White House cannot veto it. I think there’s a lack of appreciation how much climate and international climate is driving the administration’s policy,” Banks said.
But to spare those higher priorities, the twin pressures of sequestration and a GOP majority in both chambers raise the likelihood that the White House, congressional Democrats and their allies will need to accept spending cuts and at least some of the Republican riders, McKenna said.
The White House might be willing to concede on the Waters of the U.S. rule, which has raised suspicions of more regulation in rural America, and the smog rule, which Obama yanked ahead of his re-election in 2011 due to industry pressure, said McKenna, Banks and the GOP source. They reasoned those two are on the table because they don’t deal specifically with climate and because Democrats in centrists or red-leaning states could feel pressure from those measures.
Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs with the League of Conservation Voters, wasn’t sure the new congressional calculus necessitated any tradeoffs.
But Sittenfeld noted language being bandied about in the Senate version of the spending bill has her “worried,” underscoring that Republicans are operating in lockstep on their long-declared intention to restrict the Obama administration’s regulatory approach.
“Obviously they’re trying to make devastating cuts to it, but there’s still a question to me of how far are they willing to let these spending bills go,” Sittenfeld told the Examiner. “We are confident that we have more allies and champions, especially when it comes to fighting climate change.”
