US Senate votes to overturn California bid to ban gasoline-powered vehicles
The Senate voted 51-44 Thursday to overturn California’s efforts to impose strict standards for vehicle emissions, as Republicans insisted they needed to halt the state’s policies before they spread nationwide.
Stop California now, said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, and the California clean energy initiatives will be less likely to spread to other states.
The Biden administration in December allowed California to take strong steps to ease vehicle emissions, including ending the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. By model year 2026, 35% of new cars sold in the state must have zero emissions.
There were two other votes Thursday to overturn other Biden administration decisions.
The Senate voted 49 to 46 to bar the state from implementing its most recent nitrogen oxide (NOx) engine emission standards.
It also agreed 51 to 45 to overturn California’s decision to require truck makers to sell zero-emission trucks.
The bills now need President Donald Trump’s signature to become law.
Republican warnings
To Republican leaders, California’s goals were not only impractical but potentially harmful.
“Under California’s electric vehicle mandate, automakers around the country would be forced to close down a substantial part of their traditional vehicle production,” said Thune.
Other states could adopt the requirement, said Thune, and that would mean “serious consequences: diminished economic output, job losses, declining tax revenues, and that is just the start.”
Republicans also painted California’s action as a vivid example of an intrusive, overreaching federal government.
Democrats have a “delusional dream of eliminating gasoline powered vehicles … (they are) going to force feed every American to make them drive an electric vehicle,” said Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyoming.
California senators and clean emissions advocates called the GOP arguments nonsense.
“If this was your city, if this was your state, wouldn’t you take action to deal with air pollution this bad, where you can barely make out the skyline?” asked Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. “In the face of threats against your own kids and your own families, you do something, and that is what California did.”
Furthermore, he said, the U.S. Senate has no business changing California’s policies.
A dangerous precedent?
By overturning a state’s effort, one given the OK by federal regulators, Schiff said, senators have set “a new precedent that will haunt them in the future.”
The House had voted in April and May to overturn the decisions. Its vote to reverse the Biden administration’s decision to approve waivers granted to California in allowing the state to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035 got 211 Republican votes and 35 Democratic votes.
It usually takes 60 Senate votes to overturn such waivers. But Republicans used a procedural tactic to require only 51 votes to make the change, a strategy bitterly protested by opponents.
Before the votes, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., warned that if the GOP succeeded, “the consequences will be far-reaching, not only for our clean energy economy, the air our children breathe, and for our climate, but for the future of the ... Senate as an institution.”
“What goes around comes around,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, without offering specifics.
None of that swayed Republicans, who saw the vote as not only a chance to warn the nation about California policies, but as a way of curbing what GOP lawmakers regard as government overreach.
“The onerous quality of this rule is just beyond description … forcing certain states and certain consumers to purchase a vehicle that they may not want or that they can’t find,” said Senate Environment and Public Works Chair Shelley Moore Capito, R-West Virginia.
“It really eliminates what I think our country was built on, which is individual choice and making the decisions for yourselves,” she said.
This story was originally published May 22, 2025 at 8:32 AM.
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