House votes 417-3 to shield ratepayers, leadership calls the anger foreign and the bill worthless.

…(cont) Palm Beach answered on September 24. Commissioners voted six to zero for a one-year moratorium on any new data center drawing 50 megawatts or more, the size that actually shows up on somebody's bill. The same day, the Department of Energy announced $5 billion in grid upgrades, aimed at the identical problem the House and the county were both chasing: more power for data centers, lower bills for everyone else, no new regulation required to get there.

Then, on September 29, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer looked at the bill that passed 417 to 3 and called it an "ineffectual participation trophy." Speaker Johnson had already gotten there first, in his own way, calling the anger driving ratepayers to write their House members a Chinese psyop — an anger apparently persuasive enough to move 417 votes, foreign enough to dismiss out loud, days apart, from men who run the same buildings those votes happened in.

Nobody called the $5 billion worthless. Nobody called Palm Beach's moratorium foreign interference. Only the bill that actually asked a corporation to pay for what it uses drew both insults — a participation trophy from one leader, a psyop from the other — while Republicans in competitive districts keep citing it anyway, because back home, nobody believes their power bill is Chinese propaganda.

That is the toolbox sitting on the table right now: a near-unanimous statute, a home-county moratorium, a five-billion-dollar grid check already cut. None of it repealed. None of it disputed on the merits. Just talked down, separately, by the two men whose job is deciding whether any of it moves.