Senate moves to unshackle America’s drivers from California’s ‘climate zealots’

FIRST ON FOX: Senate Republicans are launching a multi-front effort targeting the legal framework they say allows California to exert outsized influence over vehicle and equipment emissions standards beyond its borders, creating economic and consumer consequences.

Republicans argue California has become the nation’s de facto emissions regulator — as manufacturers rarely create separate product lines for the Golden State and instead are inclined to build to Californias standards, creating implicit national requirements.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo. — a top member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) — is leading the effort alongside Sens. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., Jon Husted, R-Ohio, and Pete Ricketts, R-Neb. They argue EPA waivers granted to California during the Obama and Biden administrations under the Clean Air Act have turned narrow environmental exceptions into de facto climate regulation advancing the state’s sweeping climate agenda.

“California’s climate zealots have run roughshod over the rest of the country for too long,” Lummis told Fox News Digital.

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“Under Governor Newsom, Sacramento has decided it can dictate what Wyoming families drive and what equipment our small businesses use. That ends today.”

Last year, lawmakers successfully rescinded three Biden-era EPA waivers allowing California to create emissions standards for trucks, cars and buses that they said gave the state outsized regulatory control. Thursdays package goes a step further by targeting earlier EPA decisions they say laid the legal foundation for those now-rescinded regulations.

Each resolution uses the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to nullify a different EPA waiver. The CRA gives Congress the power to check agencies’ executive power.

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Because the CRA bars agencies from issuing rules that are “substantially the same” without new authorization from Congress, Republicans argue overturning the waivers would prevent future administrations from simply reinstating them — which targets the legal foundation of such carveouts.

Collectively, the package targets California’s authority over gas-powered lawn equipment, passenger vehicle emissions standards, the Advanced Clean Cars program and the original 2009 EPA waiver allowing Sacramento to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles.

In the 1960s, the Clean Air Act gave California a narrow carve-out to seek EPA waivers for emissions rules that could be stricter than federal standards — but critics say the exemption, originally intended to address severe Los An