EPA head knocks McConnell’s climate rule amendment

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is “confused” about how exactly the Clean Air Act works.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said that, despite the amendment McConnell sponsored last week in the Senate budget, the agency will not take away states’ highway funds if they fail to comply with the Obama administration’s climate rule for power plants.

{mosads}“We actually don’t have the legal authority … to withhold highway funds,” McCarthy said Monday at an event hosted by Politico.

She attributed McConnell’s amendment to a confusion about how the climate rule will be enforced upon states. While other regulations can be enforced through federal highway funds, the climate rule cannot be.

“He’s getting confused between a state implementation plan under the national ambient air quality standards and this section of the Clean Air Act,” McCarthy said.

“This is a standard compliance system, where we set the standards, the states implement, and then the sources are responsible to achieve the emission reduction targets that are in there.”

McConnell’s amendment passed the Senate last week in its nonbinding budget resolution.

While the amendment does not hold the force of law, it says the EPA should not be allowed to withhold highway funds from states if they do not follow the rule, which is due to be made final this summer and implemented within a year.

“It says that Washington bureaucrats shouldn’t be allowed to punish innocent Americans by threatening the roads and bridges they use,” McConnell said at the time, “just because a citizen’s state may take a wait-and-see approach … as courts rule on EPA regulations.”

McConnell spokesman Don Stewart said McCarthy’s statement “should give great comfort of the governors who intend to fight the EPA’s new regulations.”

Despite sponsoring the amendment, McConnell has maintained that the EPA cannot withhold highway funds, saying in a letter to state governors earlier this month that the agency “has no authority to either bring a lawsuit against any state that fails to submit a state plan, or to withhold federal funds from states that decline to submit a plan.”

— This story was updated at 4:05 p.m.