Republicans in tight races cite ratepayer bills their own speaker dismissed as a Chinese psyop.

…(cont) That bill was about the power bill. On September 16, the House passed it 417 to 3, shifting data-center electricity costs off ratepayers and onto the tech companies running the servers — Speaker Johnson's own chamber, the same week Johnson called the ratepayer anger behind it a "Chinese psyop." The muscle doesn't wait for the boss to agree the wall is load-bearing; it wrecks it anyway, and 417 members did.

Senator Jon Husted didn't wait for that argument to settle either. He built a Senate companion, the Ratepayer Protection Act, out of a part already lying around — states' own existing authority to set electric rates — and called for a floor vote needing only that nobody object. Schumer moved against the Senate version, the pilot's counter-signal that the fix was getting off the ground with or without leadership's blessing. On September 24, the Energy Department added $5 billion for grid and transmission upgrades, the agency's own framing calling it bill relief while the buildout it funds keeps expanding. The next day, Palm Beach County — Mar-a-Lago's own zip code — voted to pause data centers of 50 megawatts or larger for a year, over those same power costs.

That's the assembly Republicans are climbing into now. Nobody had to invent a fix. The chamber already voted 417 to 3, the senator already found the statute, the state already had the authority — the only thing standing between the ratepayer and relief was whether anyone would use it, and it took a psyop accusation to get there.