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Raul Grijalva
Photo:
Tom Williams/Zuma Press
Now that President Biden has signed his party’s tax, climate and IRS bill, Sen.
Joe Manchin’s
narrative is that a grateful Democratic Congress will move to repay his vote with permitting reforms. That’s what party leaders promised, he says. Yet the West Virginia Senator’s leverage is already gone.
Democratic Rep.
Raul Grijalva
is saying he feels no “obligation” to support a permitting payoff for Mr. Manchin. “I didn’t shake hands,” he told the Hill newspaper. “I wasn’t part of the negotiations.” Mr. Grijalva added that he and a handful of colleagues intend to ask that permitting changes be brought up in the House for a separate vote, not tied to the next government funding bill that could be a vehicle for reform to get past progressives.
How Mr. Manchin navigates this is unclear. If his permitting package is real, how does he expect it will get through this Congress? Given the thin Democratic House margin, Mr. Grijalva and a handful of other Democrats might be enough to cause trouble. Yet to win over Mr. Grijalva and company, the reform deal would need to be extraordinarily weak.
The dire need for permitting reform is news that stays news. Last week the Bureau of Land Management entered a settlement with green groups that will pause oil-and-gas leasing on 2.2 million acres in Colorado. The feds will do more environmental reviews, including an analysis on the climate effects of incremental drilling, which might take two years.
The suspicion is always that such settlements are collusive: A green group sues, and the Biden Administration settles to get a policy it favors anyway, without the benefit of political accountability. Taxpayers who favor drilling get no say, and politicians argue they were merely following a court order.
Separately, a federal judge in Montana last week reinstated a 2016 moratorium on new coal leasing, saying that the policy’s reversal under the Trump Administration didn’t include the right environmental reviews. Both of these cases involved the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA for short.
Federal approvals are one side of permitting reform, but these lawsuits are the bigger problem. Even if a Democratic administration approves a permit, green groups will sue to block it using the vague NEPA standards that were written a half century ago and desperately need to be updated.
If Mr. Manchin’s permitting changes don’t include substantive limits on NEPA lawsuits, they won’t be worth much in practice. And the West Virginian will look like he’s been taken for a ride by fellow Democrats—or that he took his state’s voters for the ride.
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Appeared in the August 19, 2022, print edition.
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