(PresidentialWire.com)- Democrats are getting some support from a traitor Republican who is working to undo the methane emissions policies of the Trump administration.
This week, Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins said she’d work with a group of Democratic senators to overturn the rollbacks of methane regulation that was instituted during the presidency of Donald Trump.
Collins is becoming the co-sponsor of a bill that would overturn Trump’s methane emissions rule. A spokesperson for Collins said the bill would use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the Trump-era policies.
The CRA enables Congress to simply overturn regulations that are instituted in the prior 60 legislative days. In this case, it allows Congress to simply do away with Trump’s methane emissions rule because it fits within that window.
In normal cases, the Senate would need to gain support from 60 members to pass legislation that would avoid the filibuster. However, if the Senate uses the CRA, it only needs a simple majority. This means that with Collins pledging her support to the cause, it can pass with the support of all other Democratic senators.
As Collins said in a statement provided to The Hill:
“I have long been a supporter of efforts to reduce pollution and tackle climate change. This resolution would help protect public health and the environment by restoring the tougher standards at EPA that significantly decreased methane emissions.”
Trump’s rule put various limits on the Environmental Protection Agency. Those limits reduced the agency’s ability to regulate methane emissions from the gas and oil sectors.
When the rule was passed, the EPA estimated it would allow for an extra 400,000 short tons of methane to be emitted into the atmosphere in the next 10 years. Environmentalists say that methane gas is potentially more hazardous to the environment than carbon dioxide.
Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the upper chamber would vote on the CRA bill to overturn the methane emissions next week. The bill, he said, would “reimpose critical regulations concerning the release of methane into our atmosphere.”
He continued:
“Methane gets little attention than its big bad brother, carbon dioxide, but in truth, methane is like carbon dioxide on steroids. Many of the things we need to do to reduce methane emissions are fairly cheap and cost effective, like plugging leaks in fossil fuel infrastructure. So, this makes common sense, especially when our globe is at risk.”
Democrats in the Senate are planning to use the CRA as a tool to undo other Trump-era rules. Some advocacy groups came up with a list of 28 rules, actually, that could be overturned by the CRA.
Among those the coalition listed were rules that opened logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, and changes to the process of asylum.
Other than the methane emissions, though, the only rule up for consideration using the CRA is a regulation from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
That Trump-era rule gives employers an advantage when facing challenges from employees who claim they faced discrimination in the workplace.
