Republicans Seek to Kill California Auto Pollution Rules Using a “Blatantly Illegal” Tactic
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration
On a warm July morning in 1943, in the middle of World War II, a thick cloud of acrid smoke blanketed downtown Los Angeles, turning its clear blue skies into an inscrutable brown haze that left Angelenos with burning eyes, noses, and throats. The aerial assault was so intense it sparked rumors of chemical warfare as city officials scrambled to identify the source of one of the city’s first bouts with smog.
Within a decade, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology had isolated the irritant in smog as ozone and identified the primary culprit: hydrocarbon emissions from oil refineries and automobiles, which interacted with compounds in the atmosphere and sunlight to form the health-harming gas.
The unique conditions that shaped Los Angeles—a steady influx of people attracted to a sunny city built for cars and ringed by pollutant-trapping mountains—made it the nation’s smog capital. They also prompted state officials to pass the nation’s first tailpipe emissions and air pollution standards in the 1960s.
Congress, in turn, recognized that California “demonstrated compelling and extraordinary circumstances sufficiently different from the Nation as a whole to justify standards on automobile emissions which may, from time to time, need to be more stringent than national standards.”
In other words, Congress gave California the authority under the Clean Air Act to ask the Environmental Protection Agency for a waiver from rules that bar states from passing stricter air and climate pollution rules than the federal government.
But President Donald Trump moved to revoke California’s special status by executive order on his first day in office, as he tried to do in his first term. On Wednesday and Thursday, the Republican-dominated House, with some Democrats, voted to pass three resolutions to revoke the waivers that underlie California’s nation-leading climate and air pollution rules through means that, critics say, abuse the law.
“Trump Republicans are hellbent on making California smoggy again,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.
Over several days on the House floor, Republicans, who once championed states’ rights, repeated Trump’s talking points about President Biden’s “radical agenda,” California’s “EV mandate” and decision-making by “unelected bureaucrats” to justify preventing California from enacting the nation’s toughest vehicle-emissions standards.
Democrats countered that Republicans’ resolutions assume illegitimate authority to assail California’s ability to pursue ambitious climate policies and protect its residents from air that is perpetually among the worst in the nation.
Maxine Dexter, an Oregon Democrat, said she opposed the resolutions “that strip away a state’s right to protect its residents from dangerous air pollution.”
More than 156 million people in this country live in counties with dangerous levels of ozone and particulate matter, Dexter said. “And yet, instead of empowering states to raise the bar on clean air, Republicans are telling them to stand down.”
The transportation sector—which includes passenger and commercial vehicles and their fuels—accounts for half of California’s greenhouse gas emissions and 80 percent of its harmful smog-causing pollutants.
On Monday, members of the House Rules Committee set the stage for how Republicans planned to subvert California’s ambitious climate policies. The committee, which controls which bills go to the floor and the terms of debate, considered three joint resolutions to use the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to provide “congressional disapproval” of the waivers—which the Republican majority called rules.
The decision by the Biden administration to grant a waiver to California “is part of an orchestrated campaign against fossil fuels by EPA bureaucrats who act without regard for the inflation it would impose on Americans,” said rules chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC). The waiver has been “exploited time and again by environmental activists” to set standards for the rest of the country, Foxx said.
“It gives California unilateral authority to cram its ‘comply or die’ zero-emission truck rule down the throats of every American,” Foxx said. “It would decimate the trucking industry, lead prices of basic commodities Americans rely on to skyrocket and burden hard-working families and truckers everywhere across the nation.”
Regulatory requirements in California, now the fourth-largest economy in the world, can impact markets nationwide. But states are free to adopt or reject California standards as they see fit under certain conditions, in keeping with Clean Air Act amendments passed under Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1990. Several other states have chosen to adopt California’s light- and heavy-duty vehicle regulations.
President George H.W. Bush signs the Clean Air Act in the East Room of the White House in 1990.George Bush Presidential Library and Museum
If Republicans cared about high prices for consumers, they would address the “economic and constitutional crisis facing American families,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat. “One hundred days of economic pain, as Trump’s on again, off again temper tantrum of tariffs tank the dollar, drive up prices, destroy the markets, and threaten a recession.”
In a letter to House leadership on Friday, automakers asked Congress to repeal the waiver supporting California’s Advanced Clean Cars II program, which requires all new passenger cars, trucks and SUVs sold in the state to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2035.
In the letter, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the traditional auto industry’s main trade group, urged the House “to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency rule permitting California and affiliated states to ban the sale of new gas vehicles.” A ban on the sale of new gas vehicles “will increase automobile prices and reduce vehicle choices for consumers across the country,” the alliance wrote.
“These CRAs are a pretty naked quid pro quo,” said Rep. Mary Scanlon, a Pennsylvania Democrat on the Rules Committee. “Republicans are giving a massive regulatory handout to their donors in the auto industry.”
The automobile industry spent more than $85 million on lobbying last year, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that tracks money in politics.
The CRA requires federal agencies to submit rules to Congress for review before they take effect. Resolutions of disapproval allow legislators to use the CRA to overturn recently issued regulations. If both the House and Senate vote against a rule, it cannot be reissued in “substantially the same form.”
Yet waivers do not fit the definition of a rule and so are not subject to the CRA, the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog, determined in 2023 and again in March. The Senate parliamentarian arrived at the same conclusion earlier this month.
The Senate parliamentarian upheld decades of precedent and confirmed that California’s waivers are not subject to the Congressional Review Act, said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, in a statement. He called attempts to use the CRA “a clearly bogus attempt to undercut California’s climate leadership.”
What’s more, experts say, there is no legal basis for rescinding a Clean Air Act waiver once it’s been issued.
“California emission standards are a matter of life and death .”
When Congress passed the Air Quality Act of 1967, and amended it as the Clean Air Act in 1970, it prohibited states from adopting their own air pollutant emissions standards for new vehicles and their engines. But since California had already passed its own vehicle pollution standards before the 1967 act was passed, Congress allowed the state to seek waivers from the EPA.
Over nearly 60 years, California has received more than 100 waivers.
The California waiver was originally viewed as essential to getting the federal law passed, with the stipulation that federal law would take precedence with exceptions for California under specific circumstances that were submitted to the EPA for review, said Ted Lamm, associate director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Every prior administration has followed the law and issued the waiver under circumstances where it is required and has not contemplated the act of rescinding it,” Lamm said. Revoking a waiver, he said, “doesn’t functionally exist as a legal concept.”
The waiver was created to address California’s unique circumstances of not only pioneering and leading the country in the creation of air-quality and air-emissions control policy, but also of having very specific air-pollution challenges relating to vehicles, geography and industry, Lamm said. “It’s a bedrock part of the Clean Air Act.”
Dave Clegern, a spokesperson for California’s Air Resources Board, which develops and oversees the state’s clean-vehicle rules, said there’s no precedent to use the CRA to revoke California’s waivers.
“By using the Congressional Review Act, the Trump EPA is doing what no EPA under Democratic or Republican administrations in 50 years has ever done, and what the US Government Accountability Office has confirmed does not comply with the law,” Clegern said.
Nonetheless, Congressional Republicans—aided by a handful of Democrats on Wednesday and 35 on Thursday—voted to use that law to cancel three waivers for clean vehicle programs issued under the Biden administration that allowed California to enact stringent car and truck emission standards. Two Democrats from conservative-leaning California districts and nearly three dozen from Ohio to Texas voted to block the waiver underlying the state’s plan to ban gas-powered vehicles by 2035.
“The president has unlocked America’s energy potential, or at least taken a giant step to do so, reopening 625 million acres for drilling, withdrawing from the disastrous Paris Climate Agreement, improving new LNG projects,” said Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican who serves on the Rules Committee, Tuesday on the House floor. “And here before us today, we have what we call CRAs, of the Congressional Review Act, and the purpose of these is to undo burdensome Biden regulations.”
“If other states don’t like California’s approach, they don’t need to follow it…But Congress shouldn’t intervene.”
Roy told the Rules Committee that he and his Republican colleagues are using the CRAs to clean up “the disastrous mess of the four years of the Biden administration.”
The CRA gives Congress the power to “look at the ridiculous regulations put in at the last part of the administration,” Roy said, which he called “radical leftist policies.”
Yet Democrats on the Rules Committee pointed out that the three agency actions the Republican resolutions are targeting are not rules. “They’re not covered by the Congressional Review Act,” said Scanlon, the Pennsylvania Democrat.
“While Congress has the unambiguous right to pass legislation to modify or cancel an agency action, what Congress can’t do is use the Congressional Review Act to nullify these three agency actions,” Scanlon said.
Several Democrats argued on the House Floor that attacks on the waivers are not only illegal but would thwart California’s ability to protect its citizens by implementing rules designed to improve air quality and public health.
Mark DeSaulnier, a California Democrat, called the Republicans’ attempt to use the CRA to kill California’s waivers “blatantly illegal.”
Zoe Lofgren, chair of the California Democratic Congressional delegation, called them “completely illegitimate,” citing the GAO and the Senate parliamentarian’s decisions.
Air pollution is responsible for killing millions of people worldwide a year, researchers reported in the journal BMJ in 2023. Fossil fuels are a primary source of these pollutants, they said, pointing to an urgent need for a rapid and just transition to cleaner energy.
A coalition of health, business, labor, faith, environmental, and consumer protection groups have urged representatives and senators to oppose the misuse of the CRA to target “ineligible policies” in multiple open letters to Congress.
“This vote is an unprecedented and reckless attack on states’ legal authority to address the vehicle pollution causing asthma, lung disease, and heart conditions,” said Kathy Harris, director of clean vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement.
“If other states don’t like California’s approach, they don’t need to follow it,” Harris said. “But Congress shouldn’t intervene and try to block state leaders from protecting their residents from dangerous pollution.”
Over several days of debate on the House floor, several Democrats urged their colleagues to consider the health and well being of their fellow Americans.
“Air pollution is directly linked with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and other diseases, and parental and childhood exposure to pollution is linked to long-term health risks adversely impacting babies and young children,” said Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley. “Just one of California’s standards that would be blocked, Advanced Clean Cars II, is estimated to reduce health-care costs by $13 billion over the next 25 years.”
Doris Matsui, a Democrat representing Sacramento, said California has the same “compelling and extraordinary circumstances” today that justified stronger emission standards under the Clean Air Act in 1970. “According to the American Lung Association’s 2025 state of the air report, five of the top ten most polluted cities in America are in California, and that includes my district.”
And California experiences some of the most severe impacts from climate change-fueled wildfires, atmospheric rivers and droughts, Matusi said.
“In Sacramento, we have faced deadly flooding from more intense winter storms as well as longer and more extreme droughts while the foothills above Sacramento are still scarred from the many wildfires we’ve seen in recent years,” she said. “California emission standards are a matter of life and death for my constituents.”
It’s difficult to imagine in today’s polarized political climate, but environmental protection used to be a bipartisan issue. The modern Clean Air Act was passed under President Richard Nixon, a California Republican, and then considerably strengthened in 1990 with penalties for polluters who failed to comply under another Republican, President George H.W. Bush.
At a signing ceremony in November 1990, Bush called the amendments “a long-awaited and long-needed chapter in our environmental history” that would usher in a new era for clean air.
Bush praised the bipartisan efforts of Congress in collaboration with industry and environmental leaders to pass what he hailed as “the most significant air pollution legislation in our nation’s history.”
“In passing the Clean Air Act on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, Congress explicitly granted California the ability to set more stringent vehicle emissions standards to protect public health from California’s unique air quality challenges,” said California’s Padilla.
Over time, as air-quality, emissions and climate challenges became more complex, Republican administrations have shifted and tried to deny the waiver, said UC Berkeley’s Lamm, starting with Bush’s son, George W., in 2008.
“But what’s happening now is a totally different, unprecedented thing that really has no basis in the law,” Lamm said. “To try to actually rescind a waiver that’s been issued, the law does not contemplate that. It’s not how the statute works.”
The administration’s attempts to undercut a system of governance designed by elected representatives of the people is “extralegal,” Lamm said, and “simply contrary to the simple principles of government.”
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