The Senate on Wednesday blocked legislation from the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee seeking to undo EPA’s approval of a South Dakota air pollution plan.
By a 43-50 procedural vote, senators opted along party lines against taking up S.J. Res. 86, a Congressional Review Act resolution aimed at repealing the agency’s sign-off with the goal of then prodding the state to do more to control haze-forming pollution from three coal-fired industrial plants.
The state plan made no updates “to significantly out-of-date controls” at those plants, with the resulting pollution blowing downwind “toward midwestern and eastern states,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said before the vote.
EPA’s approval, he said, “puts forward a reading of the Clean Air Act that is blatantly at odds” with its text and “encourages the spread of harm to the downwind states from these polluting plants.”
