Politico: Inside Congress – Exclusive: Schumer’s new megabill play
By Lisa Kashinsky, Mia McCarthy and Ben Leonard
Chuck Schumer tells us Democrats have a ripe new target in their fight against the megabill: leveraging Republican infighting over whether to eviscerate clean-energy credits.
In an exclusive interview with Lisa Thursday, the Senate minority leader said his caucus is looking to make it politically untenable for Majority Leader John Thune and his members to follow House Republicans in gutting green credits under the Biden-era climate law. Those credits, Schumer points out, have widely benefited red states.
Schumer’s game plan: Needle Republicans already wary of job and investment losses back home to compel Thune to skip the drastic cuts that House GOP leaders included to bring hard-liners along.
How Senate Democrats will do it: Ramp up the public pressure campaign Schumer kick-started Thursday against the backdrop of a rooftop solar field in Manhattan, and force Republicans to take tough votes through eventual vote-a-rama amendments.
“There are a whole number of Republicans, particularly those that have a lot of clean-energy investments in their states, who really didn’t like what the House did,” Schumer told Lisa. “And the question is: Will they be able to put enough pressure on Thune, or even vote [with us] on some amendments?”
Why Schumer sees this as a fruitful avenue for attack: A quartet of GOP senators — Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, John Curtis and Jerry Moran — warned their leadership weeks ago against a “full-scale repeal of current credits.” Tillis has already raised concerns about the House language. Schumer said he’s spoken privately to “a good number of Republican colleagues” who dislike the House’s cuts, but declined to name names.
“The irony here is most of the new solar, wind and battery factories are in red states. And so we want to make it clear … [the rollbacks] are going to be huge problems in their states,” Schumer said.
Democrats may have an unlikely ally in this fight. Elon Musk’s Tesla on Thursday blasted plans to phase out the clean-energy tax credits and terminate most credits for electric vehicles at the end of the year, arguing it would “threaten America’s energy independence and the reliability of our grid.”
But Republicans have a more pressing challenge awaiting in the Senate. Pet policy provisions that House Republicans tucked into the megabill could get ruled out by the Senate parliamentarian for not meeting the Byrd Rule — the requirement that components of a reconciliation package have budgetary impacts. And they could get cut in what’s known as a “Byrd Bath.”
The seven “Byrd droppings” to keep an eye on, per our Jordain Carney this morning: tax-cut accounting, AI regulations, judicial powers, gun regulations, farm bill provisions, Planned Parenthood funds and energy permitting.
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