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congressional review act
Senate GOP Sends Trump Bill Handing Over Arctic Refuge to Big Oil
"Once again, oil and gas development is taking precedence over science-based solutions for conserving wildlife and mitigating climate change," said one campaigner.
Dec 04, 2025
Climate campaigners, conservationists, and Indigenous people vowed to keep defending the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after US Senate Republicans on Thursday sent legislation that would restart fossil fuel leasing in ANWR's Coastal Plain to President Donald Trump's desk.
All Republicans present except Sen. Susan Collins of Maine supported House Joint Resolution 131. The 49-45 vote came after three Democrats—Reps. Jim Costa (Calif.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), and Vicente Gonzalez (Texas)—joined all GOP House members but Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.) in advancing the bill last month.
If Big Oil-backed Trump signs the joint resolution of disapproval, as expected, it will nullify the Biden administration's December 2024 efforts to protect over 1 million acres of land in Alaska from planet-wrecking oil and gas exploration.
"Simply put, the Arctic refuge is the crown jewel of the American National Wildlife Refuge System," Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) said in a Wednesday floor speech against the measure, noting that the area is "home to hundreds of iconic wildlife species."
"The Arctic refuge is also deeply connected to the traditions and daily life of the people who have lived there for thousands of years," the senator continued, ripping "the Trump administration's relentless attacks on public lands."
Heinrich's speech was welcomed by groups including the Alaska Wilderness League, League of Conservation Voters, and Defenders of Wildlife, whose vice president of government relations, Robert Dewey, also blasted lawmakers' use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal the refuge's protections.
"Once again, oil and gas development is taking precedence over science-based solutions for conserving wildlife and mitigating climate change. In these instances, the use of the CRA accomplishes nothing meaningful and instead harms iconic species such as polar bears, caribou, wolves, and migratory birds," Dewey said after the vote. "In addition to threatening wildlife, severe regulatory disruption in Alaska is the inevitable result of targeted rollbacks in one of America's most ecologically critical regions."
Andy Moderow, senior director of policy at Alaska Wilderness League, said Thursday that "while we are deeply disappointed by the final vote, we're grateful to see bipartisan support from lawmakers who stood up for the Refuge and upheld a long-standing, cross-party legacy of protecting this truly incredible place."
"America's public lands—including the iconic Arctic refuge—shouldn't be on the shortlist for a public land selloff to the oil and gas industry," Moderow continued. "We'll continue fighting the management chaos brought by today's vote in favor of actions that respect the Arctic Refuge for what it actually is: a national wildlife refuge, and not an oilfield."
Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, a group formed decades ago by Alaska Natives in response to proposed oil drilling in the Coastal Plain, also spoke out after the Senate vote.
"The Gwich'in Nation views the decision by lawmakers to leverage the Congressional Review Act to advance oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a deliberate attempt to undercut the standards and laws that are designed to protect this sacred landscape," Moreland said.
"This action from DC ignores years of consultation and communication with our Gwich'in communities that rely on this landscape for not only our subsistence and survival, but also our culture and spiritual health and well-being," she added. "We stand united in our opposition to any oil and gas development in the Arctic refuge, and will continue to fight this effort from the Trump administration and decision-makers who ignore our voices."
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'Latest Betrayal of Democracy': Trump Signs Order Blocking CA Effort to Ban New Gas-Powered Cars
"There is no reason politicians in Washington should be stepping in at this late date to try and undercut states' protections for their residents," said one climate advocate.
Jun 12, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday signed multiple Congressional Review Act resolutions that target California's efforts to adopt electric vehicles statewide and phase out gas-powered cars, in a move that one climate campaigner called "Trump's latest betrayal of democracy."
Trump reversed a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency waiver granted to California during the waning days of the Biden administration that allowed the state to enforce tougher vehicle pollution standards. That decision allowed California to require that gasoline-powered cars be phased out, and implement a ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered cars completely in 2035.
The other resolutions signed by Trump revoked waivers for a policy that required half of all new trucks sold in California be electric by 2035, and overturned a policy that placed limits on "allowable emissions of nitrogen oxide from cars and trucks," according to The New York Times.
Congress, which is Republican-controlled, passed a measure in May that paved the way for Thursday's signing. At the time, the Senate parliamentarian, the unelected arbiter of the chamber's procedures, said that the EPA waivers did not qualify as federal rules for the purpose of the Congressional Review Act (CRA). The Government Accountability Office has also said they aren't subject to the law.
The CRA gives lawmakers a limited window to overturn federal rules, and resolutions brought under the law are not subject to the Senate filibuster.
Green groups sharply condemned Trump's signing of the resolutions.
"Signing this bill is a flagrant abuse of the law to reward Big Oil and Big Auto corporations at the expense of everyday people's health and their wallets," said Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign, on Thursday.
Simon Mui, managing director for transportation at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Thursday that "California's vehicle standards reduce costs for drivers, increase customer choice, boost domestic manufacturing, improve air quality, and help address the climate crisis."
"There is no reason politicians in Washington should be stepping in at this late date to try and undercut states' protections for their residents," Mui continued. "The oil industry may be celebrating today, but the rest of us are going to continue to keep fighting for cleaner air, lower energy bills, and a safer climate."
Katherine García, director of the Sierra Club's Clean Transportation for All campaign, said on Thursday that "instead of investing in electric vehicle manufacturing here in the U.S. and leading us towards a healthier future, the administration is dead set on pushing us backwards and ceding EV innovation and leadership to China."
Shortly after Trump signed the resolutions, California officials announced they had filed a lawsuit over the move. A statement from Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom's office called the resolutions "illegal."
"The president's reckless, politically motivated, and illegal attacks on California continue, this time with his attempt to trample on our longstanding authority to maintain more stringent clean vehicle standards," said California Attorney General Bonta in a statement Thursday announcing the legal challenge. "The president is busy playing partisan games with lives on the line and yanking away good jobs that would bolster the economy—ignoring that these actions have life or death consequences for California communities breathing dirty, toxic air."
California also recently filed a legal challenge over Trump's decision to order the deployment of National Guard members and Marine troops to Los Angeles in response to protests that sprang up in response to federal immigration raids.
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Senate GOP Gives Dems a Chance to Tank Trump's Budget Bill—Will They Take It?
"Given the high stakes of the budget bill—soaring inequality as benefits for the poor are slashed to finance tax cuts for the rich—every tool at Senate Democrats' disposal should be employed," wrote journalist David Dayen.
May 29, 2025
By voting to overrule the Senate parliamentarian last week, the chamber's Republicans handed their political opponents a procedural weapon that could be used to hold off or even kill the House-passed reconciliation package that's central to President Donald Trump's legislative agenda.
The question is: Will Senate Democrats take advantage?
Last Thursday, Senate Republicans used the filibuster-proof Congressional Review Act (CRA) to approve a resolution revoking a federal waiver that allowed California to set tougher vehicle pollution standards. In doing so, the GOP majority ignored the parliamentarian's determination that the waiver did not qualify as a rule subject to the CRA.
Both before and after the vote, Senate Democrats warned their Republican colleagues that the move could come back to bite them in the future.
"Is this really the path we want to go down?" Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) asked in a floor speech earlier this month. "A future Democratic administration could submit every oil and gas lease issued since 1996 as a rule, as the subject of disapproval resolutions... Is it worth going nuclear, knowing full well the Pandora's Box this would open?"
The American Prospect's David Dayen wrote Wednesday that because the Senate "operates largely on precedent," Republicans' vote effectively means that "virtually any action the executive branch takes could be construed as a rule, and therefore subject to fast-track congressional review."
"For this reason, Democrats could subject the Senate to time-consuming resolution votes repeatedly, to such a degree that the Senate would not have time to do anything else for the rest of this session of Congress," Dayen wrote. "In other words, Democrats could respond to the waiver vote by paralyzing the Senate, and stopping the giant Trump tax bill from ever reaching the floor."
While Democrats are in the Senate minority, it only takes 30 senators to force a CRA resolution of disapproval to the floor of the upper chamber. Under CRA procedures, "any senator may make a nondebatable motion to proceed to consider the disapproval resolution on the floor." If that privileged motion is approved, the disapproval resolution would be subject to up to 10 hours of debate.
"The bottom line is this: If you found something like 1,000 current or former agency actions—a reasonable number considering all the work executive branch agencies do—you would probably have enough to keep the Senate debating and voting on CRA resolutions through the duration of this Congress," Dayen wrote. "Given the high stakes of the budget bill—soaring inequality as benefits for the poor are slashed to finance tax cuts for the rich—every tool at Senate Democrats' disposal should be employed. Republicans just handed them a big one."
As Dayen pointed out, Senate Democrats—including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—are aware of the hugely disruptive potential of the precedent set by their Republican counterparts.
In a May 1 letter to top Senate Republicans, Schumer and 19 other Democrats warned that if the GOP moved ahead with their plan to bypass the parliamentarian, "the CRA could be weaponized to retroactively invalidate decades of agency actions—including adjudications, permits, and licensing decisions that were never previously considered 'rules'—and effectively hijack the Senate floor."
It's far from clear that Democrats would be open to exploiting the procedural loophole Republicans created, even as members of the minority party face growing pressure from their base to fight back more aggressively against the Trump-GOP agenda—which includes catastrophic cuts to Medicaid, federal nutrition assistance, and green energy programs.
In a piece for the Prospect earlier this month, former House Oversight Committee staffer Todd Phillips outlined the potential CRA strategy. Asked by the Prospect on Wednesday, Phillips said he had not yet received any response on the idea from congressional Democrats.
"But we know they're aware of it; they have said it out loud," wrote Dayen on Wednesday. "They could start the campaign any day now."
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