The House has voted to cancel a Labor Department rule that allows retirement plan managers to weigh environmental and social issues when making investments.

The House voted 216-204, largely along party lines, to roll back the rule. House Republicans used the Congressional Review Act to rein in the Labor Department’s rule-making, which is a little-known tool that allows Congress to overturn federal rules with only a simple majority vote in the House and Senate.

The Senate must now vote on the matter, and Republicans have been working hard to lobby some of the more centrist Democrats to vote with them. If the Senate passes the repeal, it would head to President Joe Biden’s desk, where he would likely issue the first veto of his presidency.

The rule in question was announced by the Department of Labor last year and would allow, though not require, fiduciaries to weigh ESG factors when making investment decisions for U.S. retirement accounts. This is part of a broader unified effort among some investment firms and Democrats to push what is known as environmental, social, and governance practices, or ESG.

While proponents of ESG goals see it as a way that the financial world can exact social change, such as mitigating climate change, Republicans see the push as an attempt to distort the free market and the culture of the country through capital and influence.

The rule dialed back previous restrictions that “unnecessarily restrained” plan fiduciaries’ ability to weigh ESG factors when picking investments, even when those factors would benefit plan participants financially, the Labor Department said in a news release last year.

After passing the House, the Senate will now have to vote to approve the resolution. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has already signaled that he will join with Republicans in voting to roll back the Labor Department rule.

While Republicans might also work to gain the support of centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), Manchin’s backing seems to clear the way for the resolution to pass through the Senate and land on Biden’s desk for a veto. That is because Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) is hospitalized and is expected to continue to be so in the coming days.

The Biden administration has already telegraphed that it won’t be reneging on its ESG stance. The administration put out a statement on Monday evening that said Biden will veto the resolution.

“The rule reflects what successful marketplace investors already know,” the administration said. “There is an extensive body of evidence that environmental, social, and governance factors can have material impacts on certain markets, industries, and companies.”

Before being taken up under the Congressional Review Act, the Labor Department’s ESG rule also faced a torrent of criticism from Republican officials at the state level.

Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes filed the lawsuit last month with the support of 24 other Republican attorneys general. The lawsuit, filed in Texas federal court, sought a preliminary injunction to stop the rule from going into effect.

“The Biden administration is promoting its climate change agenda by putting everyday people’s retirement money at risk,” Reyes said. “Americans are already suffering from the current economic downturn. Permitting asset managers to direct hardworking Americans’ money to ESG investments puts trillions of dollars of retirement savings at risk in exchange for someone else’s political agenda.”

ESG has very quickly gone from a three-letter acronym that only a niche segment of the finance world was familiar with to a major political issue for Republicans, who claim it is the vehicle that corporations are using to incorporate “wokeness” into business and, ultimately, culture.

As the country approaches the 2024 presidential election, ESG will likely be a talking point for Republicans on the campaign trail. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has already dug into the matter, proposing legislation this month that would prohibit the use of ESG in all investment decisions at the state and local level and block state and local governments from weighing ESG when issuing municipal bonds.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, who also appears teed up for the presidential contest, even released a statement on Twitter in response to Biden’s plan to veto the rollback of the Labor Department rule.

“Disappointing that President Biden is putting ESG and woke policies above hard-working Americans' retirement accounts! We will keep fighting until we put a stop to ESG once and for all!” Pence tweeted on Tuesday.