Thomas Catenacci of the Washington Free Beacon reports on Democrats’ efforts to preserve a controversial electric vehicle mandate.
Democrats are relying on a recent memo from the Government Accountability Office to argue that President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans can’t pass a bill repealing a Biden-era waiver allowing California to mandate electric vehicles in the state. But legal experts say the memo—whose authors include a prominent DEI activist—isn’t legally binding and relies on dubious reasoning.
The Government Accountability Office—which conducts audits and analyses for Congress but has minimal legislative authority—published the memo earlier this month just two weeks after Democratic senators Adam
Schiff (Calif.), Alex Padilla (Calif.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) asked it to investigate the issue. Media outlets then reported that the memo determined a bill to reverse the Biden-era action is “illegal” and that the office, therefore, “blocks” such a bill.The office’s memo presents a potential roadblock to Trump’s energy agenda, a key tenet of which involves revoking electric vehicle mandates. Democrats, who cheered the opinion immediately after it was published, may request that the Senate parliamentarian weigh in on the issue and consult the Government Accountability Office’s opinion.
If Democrats are successful in using the opinion to block the bill, the California electric vehicle mandate can only be overturned through a formal Environmental Protection Agency rulemaking process that would take years to complete and likely attract legal challenges.
But experts say there are key legal deficiencies in the Government Accountability Office’s opinion. “It’s just sloppy work,” Michael Buschbacher, a former counsel at the Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, told the Washington Free Beacon. “I think the goal of what they were doing was to insert themselves in this process.”
And the quick turnaround on the document raises questions about the level of involvement from the Democratic lawmakers who requested the opinion—the office usually takes months to complete analyses, not a couple of weeks.
