Rand Paul’s Pro-Polluter Bill Shot Down by Senate

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All but one of the Senate Democrats – and even seven Republicans – defeated a bill on Thursday that would have blocked the EPA from slashing power plant air pollution that blows downwind to other states and causes lung and heart problems.

Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican and Tea Party favorite, proposed a bill to kill the Cross State Air Pollution Rule that the EPA finalized in July. The EPA rule is designed to slash air pollution from coal-fired power plants east of the Rocky Mountains. It would reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by 73 percent by 2014, from 2005 levels. It would cut nitrogen oxide emissions by 54 percent by 2014.

Paul’s bill to stop the EPA needed only a simple majority of 50 to pass, not the now familiar 60. Because Republicans were in favor of the bill to curtail the EPA, they did not prevent the majority from holding the vote using with their now-inevitable cloture-vote “filibuster” under which, according to Senate rules, a minority of 40 can refuse to hold a vote. Now increasingly used by Republicans, it essentially requires 60 votes to agree to hold an up or down vote on any bill, resulting in a gridlocked government that is essentially nonfunctioning.

But the bill to kill the Cross State Air Pollution Rule the EPA finalized in July was one of the few to be allowed in Minority Leader “Mitch McConnell’s Senate” this year, because the coal industry predominantly funds Republicans – while environmental public interest groups – that oppose fossil energy – mostly fund Democrats.

Surprisingly, though, once the bill went to the normal up or down vote, not even all the Republicans actually supported killing the EPA rule. All of the Democrats except one and seven Republicans flouted the coal industry. In an up or down vote, 52 Democrats AND 40 Republicans agreed to continue to allow the EPA to do the work that we taxpayers hired the EPA to do. House Republicans have already passed a similar bill. But with this defeat, the EPA rule lives.

The EPA is one of the few tools that the Obama administration has to prevent “the seas from rising.” Shutting down polluting coal powered energy and replacing it with clean powered energy is only sensible, because the greenhouse gases that coal power emits will ultimately end our civilization within centuries, while clean power will allow its continuation, which should not be an issue about which reasonable people get so upset, but in the US, it is.

So the framing is all about how disgusting dirt is, as that is something that apparently polls better with conservatives, even though it is not as dangerous as climate change.

“I know all of us, 100 of us in this chamber would condemn it if somebody took all their garbage and put it on the lawn of the next-door neighbor,” the Democratic Chairman of the Environemt and Public Works Committee, Barbara Boxer said on the Senate floor.

 


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