Democrats are pitching themselves as the answer to the economic woes Americans are facing in their pursuit of power in Congress, but they have made a habit of blocking the GOP’s attempts to tackle cost of living issues.
Affordability has become the centerpiece of the Democrats’ campaign messaging heading into Election Day in November, and they’ve wielded it like a political cudgel that left-wing candidates from Michigan to Texas are using to browbeat Republicans.
But in the Senate, it requires cooperation and compromise to tackle those issues, and Republicans say that their colleagues across the aisle have bedeviled that process. They’ll have one last shot Wednesday to address a sliver of the issue with a bill targeting data centers and voters’ pocketbooks, but Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and his caucus are poised to block it.
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“I think right now, the whole thing is just, you know, play politics with all these issues and get to the election,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told Fox News Digital. “I think that, you know, what you’re seeing is that this is the party of no, can’t take yes for an answer, and is interested in just trying to politicize everything going into the election.”
When asked if blocking the data center bill, and another that would ban members of Congress from trading stocks, could turn the table on Democrats’ messaging, Thune said, “Well, it makes it pretty hard for Democrats to make that argument.”
Democrats don’t believe that blocking the bill from Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, would hurt their affordability message, particularly because the legislation lacks teeth — many of the requirements for large-load customers, like data centers, to repay their electricity usage are optional.
Schumer trashed the data center bill as being purely politically motivated to bolster a vulnerable candidate staring down a tough race in November against former Sen. Sherrod Brown, even though only three House Democrats voted against it earlier this month.
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“Because we don’t vote for frauds,” Schumer said when asked why Senate Democrats wouldn’t vote for it. “It’s voluntary. Not a single company has to comply with it.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told Fox News Digital that if “you guys do your job and explain that the bill does nothing,” the political ramifications would be low for Democrats.
“It does nothing, and so people know that, but there’s more political risk for them than for us,” Murphy said.
When asked if there was a concern that shutting the bill down could hamper their best weapon on the campaign trail, Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., told Fox News Digital, “Absolutely not.”
“The American people can see through just the politics of this. They know that this bill is good for Senator Husted, but not necessarily for them, because it’s not — it doesn’t have anything that would actually force change,” Kim said.
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Not all Democrats want to outright kill the GOP’s latest affordability push, however.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., isn’t totally against allowing the legislation to proceed, but he wants a guarantee from Thune that his bill, the Power for the People Act, would get an amendment vote to add some regulatory heft to the measure.
“You want to address the affordability issue, you need to do something real,” Van Hollen told Fox News Digital. “As soon as Senator Thune says he’ll have a vote on Power for the People Act, then for sure, we should go forward.”
It’s not the only attempt at grappling with affordability issues that Democrats have sunk, or at least kneecapped, near the finish line before the midterms.
Republican leaders wanted to get a deal on permitting reform, which would lower costs on energy projects and reform the regulatory process writ large, on the floor during this final sprint before the election, but Democrats walked away from the deal last week.
“I would tell you, all the chemistry, I think, was perfect for getting this deal done,” Sen. Alan Armstrong, R-Okla., who has led the permitting reform push, told Fox News Digital. “And that doesn’t happen very often on such a complex issue. So it’s very disappointing.”
The deal is reportedly back on, but won’t be handled until after the election during Congress’ lame duck period, where several agenda items have been punted that may never see the light of day.
Still, Republicans will need Democrats to get anything post-election, and the track record of bipartisanship over the near two years that they’ve controlled the chamber has ebbed and flowed.
“I mean, we got 53 Republicans, you got to have 60. I’d have busted the filibuster a long time ago, and we would’ve had a lot more done,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., told Fox News Digital. “But we wasted a year and a half of President Trump.”
