>In both cases the California standard was higher, improving the environment and saving lives.
Not the lives of the people who would have been saved by safety features in a car they weren't driving because they couldn't afford it or because the implementation of a particular safety feature was a lower priority than the implementing a second variant of emissions equipment and calibration.
Stuff like this is fairly zero sum.
>What happened to the states being policy laboratories
The federal government could implement this as a FMVSS if they wanted.
Neither party has a monopoly on saying one thing and doing another.