Republicans resume efforts to stop CO2 rules

Congressional Republicans are vowing to block new CO2 regulations for power plants, but their efforts face long odds given the high vote tally needed to overcome a presidential veto.

As the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized its Clean Power Plan yesterday, Republican leaders were promising to resume their efforts to prevent the regulations from ever taking effect, or at least to delay them for several years.

The US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee tomorrow will take up legislation to extend the Clean Power Plan's compliance deadlines until after the courts have a chance to review the program. The bill by senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia) would also give governors the authority to opt-out of the Clean Power Plan if they determine that complying would harm their state's ratepayers or over grid reliability concerns alone. The House of Representatives passed a similar bill in May.

"Now that this rule is finalized, the need for congressional action is even more apparent," Capito said.

But these efforts face high hurdles. The Republican-controlled House can easily pass any legislation with little or no Democratic support. But Republicans, who hold 54 seats in the Senate, would need to win significant backing from across the aisle to clear the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster or the 67 votes to override a certain veto from President Barack Obama. At least three Democrats, senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana, have expressed varying degrees of opposition to the regulations over the past year. Manchin is the lone Democratic co-sponsor of the Capito bill.

If enacted, either bill could push back compliance by three or more years as the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over challenges to EPA regulations, and then possibly the US Supreme Court, review the regulations. More than a dozen states have already said they intend to file suits in the DC Circuit. Those suits would likely be filed once the Clean Power Plan is published in the Federal Register.

The plan requires states to meet CO2 emissions targets by 2030, with reductions to start in 2022. States must submit final compliance plans to EPA by September 2018, with initial plans due in September 2016.

The Capito legislation is just one option available to congressional opponents of the regulations. Republicans have also included restrictions in fiscal year 2016 spending bills that have yet to clear Congress. And the formal publication of the rules will give Republicans another legislative tool, a little-used law called the Congressional Review Act. It essentially allows Congress to veto new executive branch regulations.

But it has been successfully employed only once, despite more than 40 previous attempts under the act to block various regulations since 1996, according to the Government Accountability Office. One of those failed efforts occurred in 2010, when the Senate defeated a resolution to overturn EPA's first steps to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

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