Managing a caucus on a bill is hard work — especially when that caucus is the Republican Party and the bill in question covers the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, chairwoman of the Interior and Environment Appropriations subcommittee, defended the $30.01 billion Interior and Environment spending bill the Senate Appropriations Committee advanced to the floor last week against Democratic criticism that Republicans loaded it with 11 “poison pill” policy riders that handcuff President Obama’s climate and environmental agenda.
“It wasn’t just me. I was going to colleagues and saying, ‘What are your priorities here?’ And when you talk to folks who say, ‘Look, when it comes to funding for EPA, my answer is you shouldn’t give them a nickel. I’m so mad at them because of X, Y and Z.’ And this is where you get to the policy provisions where, again, the agency that is going outside their jurisdictional authority. How do you rein that in?,” the Alaska Republican told reporters.
The bill includes provisions that would block or delay implementation of proposed EPA limits on carbon emissions from power plants, the centerpiece of Obama’s climate plan. It also calls for scuttling a rule expanding the agency’s jurisdiction over waterways, preventing the EPA from issuing a more stringent standard for ground-level ozone, or smog, and barring the Interior Department from listing the greater sage grouse, a bird found in 11 Western states, as an endangered species.
Democrats didn’t make it easy for Murkowski to keep riders off the bill, sources said. That’s because the minority leadership pledged to block spending bills on the floor because they disliked that Republicans were following sequestration-level budget caps. If Democrats hold the line, they would prevent Republicans from trying to pass controversial measures as amendments on the floor. But whether that obstacle was a trigger for riders is questionable — Murkowski said that it wasn’t.
The spending bill is a far cry from the legislation Murkowski said she wanted to advance in February, detractors said. Murkowski, who also is chairwoman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told reporters at the time, “You’re going to have folks that will want to load this particular bill with a lot of different, clever ideas as to ways they can either make things happen or stop things from happening.” She said she wanted to avoid a “messaging” bill and instead produce something that could pass.
“This doesn’t look like that,” said Josh Saks, senior legislative representative with the National Wildlife Federation. “I think certainly this is the type of bill that is not made for bipartisan support.”
Murkowski said the riders were sensible and offered a state-centric approach to complying with regulations that she said have questionable legal authority. One measure allows states to wait on submitting a plan for complying with power plant emission limits until the courts decide its legality, and another allows states with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, regulations to ignore new federal standards.
That Murkowski would take off the table one of the best options for restraining policies that GOP lawmakers — chiefly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — have vowed to kill was unrealistic, observers said. After all, the must-pass spending bills typically afford the most effective routes for blocking executive branch decisions with which Congress disagrees.
“It’s not a new thing that you have policy riders on appropriations,” Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., a member of the spending subcommittee, told the Washington Examiner. “The overreach of some of these regulations right now are having a significant impact on jobs.”
But spending bills without riders do exist. The Appropriations Committee passed the Energy and Water spending bill in late May without any controversial measures attached. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of that spending subcommittee, convinced his colleagues to hold off on amendments that could derail the bill because he promised they would address those provisions on the floor.
GOP sources said all bets were off when Democrats said they would hold the line to oppose sequestration.
“They’re playing with live ammo,” a Republican aide told the Examiner.
Still, even Alexander acknowledged that the Interior and Environment spending bill is naturally more controversial than the Energy and Water bill given the number of regulations that come from the EPA and Interior. That the spending bill would have avoided potentially partisan waters was unlikely if Murkowski were to do justice by her Republican colleagues.
Murkowski said the Democrats’ strategy didn’t affect the course of her subcommittee’s spending bill, but she noted the insistence by Obama and Democrats to reject all sequestration-level budgets made crafting her legislation more of a headache.
“Your question very directly is: Was this my intention all along? My intention was to build a bill that was reflective of members’ priorities given the limitations we have,” she told the Examiner. “But we’ve got a law that we’re operating within the constraints. So how we dealt with that was difficult, it was challenging. The president chose not to deal with that. He chose to ignore the law.”
