The U.S. Senate employed an unconventional method to jettison California’s mandate that all new vehicles sold in the state be zero-emission by 2035, ignoring its parliamentarian and the federal government’s auditor to push the vote through.

The action, supported by automakers and the oil and gas industry, has broad repercussions because about a dozen other states had followed California in adopting similar laws to boost clean vehicle fuels in efforts to cut pollution.

The Biden administration granted Environmental Protection Agency waivers for California’s mandate in one of multiple waivers in the decades since passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act due to the state’s historically high air pollution. This was the first time Congress nixed one of the waivers.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney Gen. Rob Bonta vowed to file a lawsuit over the Senate vote, Bonta saying Senate Republicans were “bending the knee to  President Trump once again.” Bonta called the Senate’s use of the Congressional Review Act to nix a state law “weaponization” of the exception.

The CRA allows the body to scuttle a federal law via a simple majority. The Government Accountability Office, though, says the waivers for California don’t apply because they’re not national. GOP lawmakers justified circumventing that direction by saying multiple states were following in California’s tire treads on the matter, making the waivers a national issue.

Automakers and others say California’s timeline for alternative-fuel vehicle sales is unrealistic, and the state’s own auto dealers association says there’s not enough consumer demand to meet it anyway. 

“The fact is these EV sales mandates were never achievable. Automakers warned federal and state policymakers that reaching these EV sales targets would take a miracle, especially in the coming years when the mandates get exponentially higher,” said John Bozzella, president and CEO of the automaker trade group Alliance for Automotive Innovation.

Meanwhile, some auto industry watchers and others say Trump administration rollbacks of clean-energy programs would forfeit innovation strides to China.

“We won’t stand by as Trump Republicans make America smoggy again – undoing work that goes back to the days of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan – all ceding our economic future to China,” said Newsom, who called the Senate’s vote illegal.

The Trump administration, which is expected to sign the Senate measure, has already cut funding to states for electric-vehicle charging infrastructure, the lack of which remains the primary hurdle to adoption, and its sights are set on phasing out federal EV tax credits that have fueled sales.

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