Leadership Quote by Jan Schakowsky

“Handcuffing” is doing the heavy lifting here: it frames federal restraint not as a dry regulatory dispute but as an act of coercion, bordering on the punitive. Jan Schakowsky’s intent is to flip a familiar Washington script. Instead of states as unruly patchworks needing uniform rules, they become pragmatic problem-solvers whose hands are being tied by distant actors with less skin in the game.

The line is carefully built to disarm the usual conservative critique of climate policy as expensive overreach. She foregrounds “the cheapest possible way,” a cost-first phrasing that borrows the language of market efficiency and ratepayer protection. It’s a rhetorical judo move: if clean fuels can be locally sourced and economically optimized, then blocking that experimentation isn’t just anti-environmental, it’s anti-competition and anti-common sense.

Subtext: this is about power and preemption. In the clean energy fights of the last decade, state standards and city procurement rules have often been the laboratory - and the leverage - for pushing markets toward renewables and lower-carbon fuels. When she says “states and localities,” she’s signaling coalition politics too: governors, mayors, public utility commissions, farm-state biofuel interests, and urban air-quality advocates all have reasons to want autonomy.

The blunt final clause, “not sound or sensible policy,” aims to paint opponents as ideologues who are choosing control over outcomes. It’s less a plea for climate virtue than an indictment of governance: if local tools can cut emissions and costs, why would anyone stop them unless they were protecting incumbents.