Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that Congress is opening a new “front” in the battle against President Obama’s climate change agenda and strict new regulations on states.
“Senators in both parties are saying enough is enough,” the Republican leader from Kentucky said on the Senate floor, after two bipartisan resolutions of disapproval were introduced to repeal climate rules that are at the center of the president’s goal of achieving a global deal on emissions later this year in Paris.
“The publication of these regulations does not represent an end, but a beginning,” McConnell said, referring to the rules’ publication in the Federal Register on Friday, initiating the final step in the rules’ implementation when they can be challenged in court. “It’s the beginning of a new front to defend hard-working middle-class Americans from massive regulations that target them.”
The regulations are a package of rules meant to reduce greenhouse gases from power plants, which many scientists blame for warming the Earth’s climate and causing increasing floods, droughts and heat waves. McConnell’s resolution would repeal the administration’s New Source rule, which critics say is a de facto ban on building new coal-fired power plants. A second resolution supported by 49 senators would repeal landmark rules for existing power plants, called the Clean Power Plan.
McConnell said the battlefront to oppose the rules “is opening here in Congress, and it’s opening across the country as states file lawsuits and governors stand up for their own middle-class constituents.”
“The battle may not be short or easy. But Kentuckians and hard-working Americans should know that I’m going to keep standing up for them throughout,” he said.
McConnell said that although Obama’s rules aspire to reduce global emissions, they actually do very little to reduce greenhouse gases.
“It won’t make any noticeable difference to the global environment,” McConnell said. “But it will ship more middle-class jobs overseas. It will punish the poor. It will make it even harder for coal families in states like Kentucky to put food on the table.”
