Congressional Cancel Culture
Once more, the Congressional Review Act rears its ugly head.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) provides a fast-track process for canceling regulations in the event that they hit an ideological nerve or offend a strong special interest. Congressional Republicans are busily trying use it to cancel environmental regulations. Earlier this month, the goal was a regulation encouraging pension managers to think about the impact of climate risks on their investments. Now, Congressional Republicans are rallying to defend dangerous pollution from trucks.
EPA’s Clean Truck Plan was issued in late December. The health advantages are considerable. In response to EPA, the rule will result in $29 billion in annual net advantages and avoid as much as 2900 premature deaths, 6700 fewer hospital admissions and emergency department visits, and 18,000 fewer cases of childhood asthma.
You possibly can’t fault the deliberation that went into this rule. The rule and accompanying evaluation are lengthy and complicated. They take up greater than 400 pages of triple-column, nice print within the Federal Register, discussing the rule’s health, engineering, and economic facets in meticulous detail. A separate document, which is a minimum of twice as long, provides detailed responses to the entire comments filed by the industry and others.
Notwithstanding any of this, thirty-two Republican Senators have filed a resolution to overturn the rule. That’s two-thirds of Senate Republicans.
How do they justify their defense of truck pollution? The sponsors say that the rule will raise costs and won’t be effective because it’s going to just keep older, dirtier trucks on the road longer. EPA devoted considerable attention to cost issues. Increased equipment costs seem pretty insignificant relative to the associated fee of recent trucks (which may run $170,000 or more). There’s a somewhat higher cost connected with the longer warranty EPA would require.
EPA estimated that the initial effect of upper purchase prices on sales might be nil or around 3%, and is likely to be partially offset due to increased truck operating lives and lower maintenance costs. (88 Fed. Reg. at 4430) Price increases may not have an enormous effect on sales partially because the associated fee isn’t that significant when spread over the 750,000 miles that a heavy-duty truck engine can last.
After all, the chances that any of the thirty-two Senators – and even their staffs – actually studied EPA’s evaluation is somewhere near zero. Why do all that work when industry lobbyists are desirous to inform you the answers?
What makes the threatened use of the Congressional Review Act especially irresponsible is that it could block any future efforts to tighten pollution regulations for heavy trucks. If Congress cancels a regulation, EPA is just not allowed to reissue the rule in “substantially the identical form” or issue a “latest rule that’s substantially the identical” because the overturned rule. Nobody really knows what this language means. So any effort EPA might make, now or in the longer term, to lower truck pollution might be at legal risk.
Fortunately, this particular effort to make use of the Congressional Review Act appears to be doomed by a scarcity of votes within the Senate and the specter of a presidential veto. Nevertheless it’s clear that, if Republicans only had more votes, few efforts to guard the environment would escape the chopping block.
