Senate Democrats kill data center bill as too weak, their candidate cashes its industry's checks.

…(cont) On September 5th, the Hill reported that House Democrats were treating a rising issue — the cost of electricity tied to data centers — as what the story itself called a "political gift," something that might help flip the House their way in November. Gift. That's the word in the piece. I wrote it down.

One week later, September 12th, the House was scheduled to take up a bipartisan bill — the Ratepayer Protection Act, they called it — aimed at making tech companies cover their own data centers' power costs. The clipping I've got says scheduled, for that coming Tuesday. It doesn't say passed, not on that date, and I'm not going to tell you it does. I just don't have that page.

Five days later, September 17th, a Senate Democrat — Senator Heinrich, of New Mexico — stopped that same bill from moving by unanimous consent, a process where it only takes one senator standing up to stop it cold. How many senators did it take, that day, to keep the Ratepayer Protection Act from passing?

Then Thursday, September 24th, Palm Beach County, Florida — the president's own county — voted six to nothing to pause new large-scale data center construction there for a year. Is that the same industry the Senate bill was written to rein in?

Which brings us to this Wednesday, September 30th. The Ratepayer Protection Act came up for a real vote in the Senate, a cloture vote, and it fell three short of the sixty it needed. Senate Democrats did the blocking. By then, the bill had already passed the House, with bipartisan support on both sides, the record says. And the reason the Democrats gave for stopping it in the Senate — I found the page — was that it was too weak. Not strong enough to actually make the tech companies pay.

I'm not arguing with that. I'm asking you to hold it next to the next thing I found.

Because that same week, the Lever reported that Deb Haaland — the Senate Democrats' own candidate for governor of New Mexico, a drought state, Senator Heinrich's home state — had taken campaign money from the data center industry. The industry the bill they'd just called too soft was written to rein in. "I can walk and chew gum at the same time," she said, asked about it. That's on the page too.

Same industry. Same week. That's what the pages said, side by side.

I was going to leave it there. But before I go back inside — one more thing, and I promise it's the last one — there's a second envelope on the porch railing, from the toll authority, renewing my transponder at a higher rate too. Same season, different company. And I keep turning back to the one question underneath it all: whose checks, the record says, paid into the Senate Democrats' own candidate for governor, the same week Senate Democrats called the data center bill too weak to pass?