Once again, Democrats have done something to ensure that Americans will face higher energy costs in the near future while simultaneously claiming that President Trump and Republicans are doing it instead.
For a year now, the Democratic message has had two legs. The first: Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are making life unaffordable — groceries, gas, rent, utilities. The second, newer and hotter: the AI data center boom is about to wreck your power bill, and Republicans are letting it happen. Ohio Democratic Senate nominee (and former Sen.) Sherrod Brown has built an entire Ohio campaign on labeling GOP Sen. Jon Husted the face of data centers.
On Wednesday, Senate Democrats had the chance to do something about the second thing. The Ratepayer Protection Act would establish that the AI companies and data centers driving the new demand bear the cost of the power they consume, instead of pushing it onto households sharing the grid — which in practice pressures the largest operations to bring their own generation rather than draw down capacity everyone else paid to build.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blocked it because he calculated that forcing Americans to pay more for their electricity is better than ‘giving Republicans a win.’ Nevermind that the win is really a victory for all Americans.
Read those two positions next to each other and the incoherence is mindnumbingly obvious. ‘Data centers are going to raise your rates,’ Democrats say, ‘and we must stop the bill making data centers pay their own way.’ The threat is urgent enough to headline a Senate campaign and not urgent enough to survive a floor vote five weeks before the election.
The House already exposed the game. That chamber passed this bill with three — three — Democratic votes against it. House Democrats in competitive districts looked at the politics of voting no on a bill about electricity prices and correctly concluded they couldn’t. Nothing in the text changed on the way across the Capitol. What changed is that the Senate majority is at stake and the bill carries the name of the Republican Brown is trying to beat.
Four Democrats couldn’t stomach it. Klobuchar, Ossoff, Warnock, and Hassan broke ranks, which is what happens when the gap between the ad and the vote gets too wide to explain at home.
Schumer’s stated reason was that the bill is toothless. That excuse has a short shelf life, because the Senate has a remedy for toothless bills and it’s called an amendment. Add the enforcement mechanism. Make it stronger. Force Republicans to vote against a tougher version during an affordability election. Democrats had that option and didn’t take it, which settles what the objection actually was.
So take stock of the ‘affordability party’s’ Wednesday. They killed a bill to hold down electric bills. Earlier the same day, they killed a bill pairing voter ID with a congressional stock trading ban — the latter aimed at members getting rich on information voters don’t have. Two votes, both against measures the public overwhelmingly supports, both on the theory that Republicans shouldn’t get a win before November.
If Democrats are not political terrorists, then there is no such designation.
