The saga of the bipartisan Senate Energy Policy Modernization Act currently held up on the upper-chamber floor due to debate regarding the Flint, Mich., water crisis, continues, though lawmakers have expressed hope that the bill will come to a vote next week.
“If we can get a deal on addressing Flint’s water crisis … and I believe that’s been reached, you should see this bill on the floor of the Senate within the next week,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said Wednesday during a panel discussion at the Advanced Projects Research Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) summit.
The bill passed committee by a vote of 18-4 in late July. The bill’s sponsors, Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), had managed to deter controversial riders until well into floor debate early last month. At that time, Michigan’s senators, Gary Peters (D) and Debbie Stabenow (D), tried to negotiate a $600 million assistance package for Flint into the energy bill.
The proposed package would be used for a joint federal-state effort to replace the city’s heavily corroded water infrastructure and fund a program to monitor Flint residents for lead exposure for the next 10 years. However, by the time the cloture vote was called on the energy bill, lawmakers had not reached an agreement on the assistance deal. The cloture vote failed 46-50 on Feb. 4, and the bill has since been in limbo.
Coons spoke in support of the bill. “Senator Murkowski of Alaska and Senator Cantwell of Washington have worked very hard to craft an enactable bipartisan energy bill in the Senate,” he said. “It has, I think, a fairly broad menu of reasonable bipartisan provisions and does not face a veto threat.”
The Energy Policy Modernization Act of 2015 is a bipartisan legislative update to the nation’s energy policy. The package aims to save energy, expand domestic energy supplies, enable infrastructure investment, protect the electric grid, boost energy trade, improve the performance of federal agencies, and renew effective conservation programs.
However, if the bill does make it through the Senate, its path in the House may be difficult. The House’s version of the energy package, which also flaunted early bipartisan support, faced a veto threat. The bill passed in a 249-174 vote after several partisan riders were attached and it lost a great deal of Democratic approval.
Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) said he voted against the House version “because it had a number of very objectionable environmental provisions.”
The House legislation took a turn early in the legislative process when its full committee markup began with the submission of an amendment in the nature of a substitute more than doubling the length of the bill with new measures. That included a provision that would require the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to “complete an independent reliability analysis of any proposed or final ‘billion dollar’ federal rule that affects electric generating units,” according to the amendment summary. This provision would likely have targeted rules finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants.
Foster, also speaking on the panel, added that “to the extent those are stripped out in the Senate, I think that really increases the chance of getting, at least, some Democratic support for this.”
