Dino Grandoni reports for The Lightbulb in the Washington Post

The GOP-controlled Senate voted Thursday to keep a Trump administration regulation on coal-fired power plants that environmentalists and congressional Democrats alike repeatedly have decried as too weak.

So why did Senate Democrats force the vote in the first place?

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) did so to make some Senate Republicans squirm — and to make sure he remains Democratic leader as his party seeks to regain control of the chamber next year.

“We would like to win. Make no mistake about it,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who sponsored the resolution with Schumer, told reporters Thursday. “But if we don’t challenge the other side to put their votes on the board, they could always hide behind the fact that, gee, there was no opportunity.”

In a 53-to-41 vote largely along party lines, the Senate rejected a measure to throw out the rule on climate-warming emissions from power plants finalized earlier this year by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency. The agency’s Affordable Clean Energy rule cuts carbon emissions from the electricity sector by less than half of what experts say is needed to avoid catastrophic global warming. And it replaced the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, which sought more aggressive limits on carbon emissions in a way that would have forced companies to switch from coal to lower-carbon energy sources.

With the ink is still drying on the final version of the EPA rule, Schumer turned to a little-used legislative tool to force a vote to repeal the regulation. The Congressional Review Act gives lawmakers 60 legislative days to review, and potentially reject, new rulemaking from federal agencies.

But it was always unlikely that Schumer, with only 47 Democratic senators, had the votes to win. Only GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who is up for election in 2020 in Maine, decided to join Democrats and vote for repeal. Meanwhile, three Democrats — Doug Jones (Ala.), Joe Manchin III  (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) — all switched sides and voted with Republicans.

But by pushing for the vote, even a losing one, Schumer showed he is willing to go on offense on climate change — an issue of increasing importance both for fellow Senate Democrats and, according to recent polling, the party’s voting base.

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