By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--May 11, 2017
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In a surprising victory for President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy, the Senate voted on Wednesday to uphold an Obama-era climate change regulation to control the release of methane from oil and gas wells on public land. Senators voted 51 to 49 to block consideration of a resolution to repeal the 2016 Interior Department rule to curb emissions of methane, a powerful planet-warming greenhouse gas. Senators John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine, all Republicans who have expressed concern about climate change and backed legislation to tackle the issue, broke with their party to join Democrats and defeat the resolution. The vote also marked the first, and probably the only, defeat of a stream of resolutions over the last four months — pursued through the once-obscure Congressional Review Act — to unwind regulations approved late in the Obama administration.Senate Republicans were attempting to use the Congressional Review Act to get rid of the regulation. They've done it successfully with 16 others since Obama left office, and in fairness to McCain, Graham and Collins, they voted to get rid of all the others. So why am I being so hard on them here, for just this one vote? Because it's indicative of a pattern, the pattern being that they will go through the motions of being Republicans when they're not really that much on the line or they're not going to get that much blowback. But when the Democrats really want something badly, these three are the most likely in the Senate to cross party lines and give them what they want.
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