Senate Democrats teamed up with some of their Republican counterparts on Thursday and blocked a wide-ranging USA energy bill in a fight over aid to Flint, Michigan, to help rectify its drinking water crisis. We now know a lack of corrosion control chemicals caused lead to leach into the drinking water. The impoverished city was under state management at the time.
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Stabenow asked leaders in the Senate for more time to come to a deal saying that Democrats have been willing to come to an agreement on what was less than half of the money they originally proposed.
Republicans also argued that state and local governments need to help pay to fix the problem and that if the federal government were to get involved it should do so as part of the annual appropriations process – where the spending can be carefully scrutinized – and not as part of an unrelated energy bill.
Failure to pass the bill would represent a major blow for Murkowski and Cantwell, who have been working since last summer to secure bipartisan support for a raft of measures that combine policies to speed up the export of U.S. gas with an extension of conservation funding, increased support for energy efficiency programmes, and plans to enhance the country’s power grid, making it easier to integrate increasing levels of renewables capacity and protect against cyberattacks.
Murkowski proposed a $550 million loan package for Flint and said she would continue work on the bill.
Residents in the city of just over 100,000 people – most of whom are black and low-income – were subjected to massive lead contamination in the municipal water supply after the city stopped sourcing from Detroit and switched to the Flint River in April 2014.
“We’re going to forge ahead and see if we can work something out”, a spokesman for Republicans on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee says.
The Republican-led Senate failed in two procedural votes to advance the bill after behind-the-scenes bipartisan talks broke down.
The White House has promised about $80 million to upgrade Flint’s water system. She’ll try to use her trip to urge lawmakers to approve $600 million in federal funding.
She says if she were president she would order a federal response to assist the city. “How it was handled was a man-made disaster”, she said Thursday.
“As this crisis has raised questions about the safety of our water infrastructure, it’s possible that other communities could be affected”, he said. “It’s not responsible, it’s not reasonable” to insist on adding the aid to the bill, he said, accusing Democrats of holding the bill hostage to “embarrass people”.
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“One-hundred thousand people in Flint, Michigan, have been poisoned, and Republicans do nothing”. Shortly after the issue was discovered, Sanders called on Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to step down over the issue.
