The United States Senate voted 73-25 on Monday to invoke cloture on a bipartisan bill that would speed up federal permitting for energy projects, comfortably clearing the 60-vote threshold and opening the way to a full vote on the measure.
Cloture limits debate rather than deciding the bill. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, known in Washington as BAAJA, still requires a vote of the full Senate, as the Albuquerque Journal reported.
The bill is sponsored by Senator Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, and co-sponsored by Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Heinrich negotiated the package over the past year, and said he had been asked by the chairs of two Senate committees to help and had agreed.
"I do believe that America needs to be able to build things again," Heinrich said. Of the bipartisan route he said: "That is the only way you get things done in Washington D.C."
The bill would streamline federal permitting for energy projects including transmission lines, pipelines and mining. It would also require data centres to absorb the cost of connecting to electricity grids, so that utility ratepayers do not carry those costs.
It would give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission limited authority to approve interstate transmission projects that fail to clear state permitting, and allow the commission to intervene in disputes over transmission lines crossing state-owned land. An amendment removed a provision that would have let data centres connect power plants in order to sell power to the grid.
The measure has drawn opposition. Environmental groups say it would weaken the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act. The All Council for Pueblo Governors opposes it, saying an amended version would make uranium projects, including one at Mount Taylor, harder to contest. "Listen to the pueblos, listen to the indigenous communities," said its chairman, Joey Sanchez of Santa Ana Pueblo.
Senator Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico voted against proceeding. "I cannot support advancing the bill in its current form," he said. Representatives Melanie Stansbury and Teresa Leger Fernandez, also of New Mexico, oppose the measure.
If the Senate passes the bill, the House must either accept it or negotiate changes capable of clearing both chambers by 3 January, according to analysts at Jefferies. Should it fail, they say, it could serve as a starting point for negotiations in 2027, but would not carry forward automatically.
The premise of the bill is that approval of a project should not take an unlimited amount of time. On Monday the Senate agreed, by 73 votes to 25, to begin considering that proposition.
The vote was not on the bill. It was on limiting debate on the motion to proceed to the bill, which is the stage at which the chamber settles whether it is willing to start. Having settled that it is willing, it will hold the vote on the measure itself, after which the measure goes to a second chamber, which may accept it or open negotiations, which may in turn produce a version capable of passing both.
Measured against the standard the bill proposes, the review now under way has no published deadline, no limit on the length of submissions and no restriction on who may ask for more time. The bill would impose all three on federal agencies.
Our analysts have accordingly reclassified the legislation. It is not a proposal to shorten approval timelines. It is the longest-running demonstration of why one is needed, it has been under preparation for a year, and the first procedural stage was completed on Monday evening.
The Department of Unnecessary Research asks only that the chamber apply the measure to itself before passing it. A body that has spent a year establishing that nothing can be approved quickly is the strongest available evidence for its own bill, and the evidence improves every time the bill is considered.