The effort to lift the crude oil export ban is gaining steam. The House will vote on legislation to repeal the ban this week following last week’s vote in the Senate Banking Committee to do the same.

The House’s effort is much more straightforward than the Senate’s. The Banking Committee muffed its chances to get its repeal to the Senate floor by attaching an amendment that is nothing but veto bait for Obama, altering the Iran nuclear agreement.

But there is another way to keep the crude oil export effort alive. The Senate also has a bill revising decades-old toxic substances law on tap. Sen. John Hoeven (R-Okla.) has said he wants to add an export ban amendment to the toxic substances bill. The supporters of each effort overlap enough, he says, that it wouldn’t be a hard sell.

The toxic substances bill in itself is an accomplishment. On Friday, a revised version of a measure originally drafted by Sens. Mark Udall (D-N.M.) and David Vitter (R-La.) gained 60 cosponsors, enough to assure passage.

The bill would update the manner in which the Environmental Protection Agency monitors toxic substances. According to is supporters, the measure also would give EPA “the authority to test and regulate chemicals according to their impact on the most vulnerable among us: children, pregnant women, the elderly and chemical workers.”

Read more: http://morningconsult.com/2015/10/the-coming-week-gop-confronts-its...