Representative Lou Correa, a Democrat who represents parts of Orange County, Calif., drives a hybrid car and wants the federal government to tackle climate change.
But he joined 34 other Democrats last week to help Republicans repeal his state’s landmark requirement that all new vehicles sold in California be electric or otherwise nonpolluting by 2035. In doing so, he helped President Trump and the Republican majority to undercut the nation’s transition away from gasoline-powered cars.
“I don’t like giving Trump a win,” Mr. Correa said in an interview after the vote. But electric vehicles remain expensive and impractical in his heavily blue-collar district, he said.
“We just finished an election where every poll I’m seeing, everybody I talk to, says, ‘You guys need to listen to the working class, the middle class people,” Mr. Correa said. “I’m listening to my constituents who are saying ‘don’t kill us.’”
The 246-to-164 vote in the House stunned environmentalists, who said they were struggling to understand why nearly three dozen Democrats voted to kill one of the most ambitious climate policies in the country. For the past few years, Democrats have overwhelmingly voted for stronger policies to tackle global warming.
Some wonder whether that unity is starting to fray in the face of intense lobbying and worries about rising prices amid Mr. Trump’s trade wars.
“It was a big disappointment,” said Margo Oge, who served as the top regulator of vehicle emissions at the Environmental Protection Agency under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
California’s plan would “save money, put the country in position to fight climate change and allow us to compete in the global marketplace,” Ms. Oge said, nodding to the fact that electric vehicles are cheaper to operate and maintain over the long run than gas-powered cars.
Transportation is the biggest source of global warming pollution in the United States, contributing about 29 percent of the country’s total carbon emissions. California’s ban, which had been adopted by 11 other states, was expected to help shift the country toward cleaner electric vehicles.
The ban is set to begin phasing in next year, mandating that 35 percent of new vehicle sales be emissions-free by 2026. California is a leader in E.V. adoption; 25 percent of new cars sold in the state last year were electric. Nationally, that share was 10 percent.
The Biden administration granted California permission to ban gasoline-powered cars under the 1970 Clean Air Act, which specifically allows California to set tougher pollution rules than the federal standards because the state has historically has had the worst air pollution.
To overturn the state’s action, House Republicans invoked the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law that permits lawmakers to reverse recently adopted regulations with a simple majority vote.
But the California ban is not a federal regulation. It’s a waiver under the Clean Air Act, something that has been granted more than a hundred times over the years by administrations of both parties. And it is not subject to congressional review, according to a 2023 decision by the Government Accountability Office and the Senate parliamentarian. Still, the Senate is expected to act within weeks.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, warned Monday of “dangerous and irreparable consequences” if Senate Republicans defied the parliamentarian.
“Such an action would be a procedural nuclear option, a dramatic break from Senate precedent with profound institutional consequences,” Mr. Schumer and 20 other Senate Democrats wrote in a letter to Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Republican majority leader.
In the House, the 35 Democrats who voted to fast-track a repeal of that waiver were a mix: moderates from red and purple states as well as those representing blue states.
Some, like Henry Cuellar, a champion of fossil fuels from Texas, and Marcy Kaptur, whose northwestern Ohio district leans slightly Republican, have been known to oppose stringent environmental regulations.
But the list also included Democrats who had been reliable supporters of climate policies. Two Californians voted against it (in addition to Mr. Correa, Representative George T. Whitesides voted to repeal the waiver). And, five Democrats from New York and one from Maine also opposed it, even though both states have adopted the California ban.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, declined through a spokesman to comment on the House vote.
Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, said he was “disappointed but not surprised” in the number of lawmakers from his party who voted against the policy.
“I chalk it up to the intense and misleading lobbying by the oil industry,” he said. He accused Republicans of “misguided and cynical attempts to gut the Clean Air Act and undercut California’s climate leadership.”
Federal records show that since January oil and gas companies along with automakers, car dealers and free market groups spent more than $10 million lobbying lawmakers about the California plan. That’s in addition to a seven-figure campaign by the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, which represents petroleum refiners.
“The car companies have been crawling all over them for weeks and months,” said Rena Steinzor, an emeritus professor of administrative law at the University of Maryland.
By contrast, environmental and public health organizations spent about $435,000 to lobby lawmakers on the California ban since January, records show.
Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, a conservative research group that supports fossil fuels, said opponents just had a better argument.
“At the end of the day people realized they don’t want to be forced into certain types of vehicles.” Mr. Pyle said. “People will vote with their pocketbooks, and the price of E.V.s for a lot of people are out of reach.”
Environmental activists, who have been fighting dozens of Trump administration and congressional actions eliminating climate protections, privately acknowledged that they did not make the California vote a priority.
Several also said they may have put too much faith in the findings by the Government Accountability Office and Senate parliamentarian that the California waiver was not subject to the kind of quick repeal provided by the Congressional Review Act.
“There’s no sugar coating this,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters. “This was a terrible vote.”
But she also argued that it was an aberration. “This one vote is not emblematic of where Democrats stand on climate change more broadly,” she said.
Representative Laura Gillen, whose New York district includes Nassau County, said she worried that restrictions in the marketplace would make gas-powered vehicles more expensive. “My constituents have seen their 401(k)s wiped out with this trade war and what’s going on in the market,” said Ms. Gillen, who voted against the California ban, referring to retirement savings plans. “The last thing they need is something to add to their financial burdens.”
“I want to reduce emissions, I care about the environment,” she said, adding, “I want to incentivize people to adopt and embrace clean energy. Putting in unworkable mandates that might actually increase costs is not the way to do it.”
Mr. Correa of California said one of the most compelling arguments he had heard about the impact of the California policy in the days before the vote came from a Chevrolet dealer in his district.
“He said to me, ‘Lou, this is going to force me to raise prices on top of the tariffs. It’s going to be a perfect storm for us,’” Mr. Correa said.
Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist and supporter of electric vehicles, agreed. Mr. Murphy said he supported California’s phaseout of combustion engine vehicles but thought it was not the ideal way to spur E.V. adoption.
“Bans are tough in a live-free kind of country,” said Mr. Murphy, the chief executive of the E.V. Politics Project, a bipartisan effort to narrow the partisan gap on electric vehicles. He said that electric vehicles needed to be a market success rather than a regulatory demand. “You have to win the hearts and minds of consumers,” he said.
Already, some states that had adopted California’s ban are pulling back.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, a Republican, last year withdrew plans to follow California’s ban. Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, a Democrat, issued an executive order last month to delay enforcement for its version of California’s ban on gas-powered vehicles. And Gov. Matt Meyer of Delaware, also a Democrat, said in an interview that if Congress did not eliminate California’s policy, he would revoke his state’s adoption of it.
Governor Meyer professed his love for electric vehicles, emphasizing that he drives a Rivian and noting that, when he served as the executive of New Castle County, he transitioned about half the county’s fleet, police vehicles excepted, to electric models.
“You can love E.V.s and want to buy E.V.s and want to invest public money in purchasing E.V.s and still be strongly in favor of the freedom for car dealers to sell what they want and car buyers to buy what they want,” he said in an interview.
The governor insisted he was still committed to Delaware’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent from 2005 levels by the end of this decade.
But without the gas-powered vehicle ban, he acknowledged, “We are working on revising our strategy to achieve those goals.”
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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