The act was designed in the 1990s by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who sought to cut back on government bureaucracy by eliminating regulations. It was engineered to allow Congress to quickly overturn regulatory rules with a simple majority, rather than the usual two-thirds vote. Critics say it\u2019s dangerous because it enables public rules and regulations based on years of research to be quickly overturned with little debate.\u00a0<\/p>
\u201cIt allows Congress to basically do a thumbs up or a thumbs down, where otherwise a filibuster would apply,\u201d explained Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit, public interest law firm. During the CRA\u2019s first 20 years of existence, it was used only once, by the George W. Bush administration. But President Donald Trump<\/a> and Republicans have\u00a0worked to dramatically expand and weaponize<\/a>\u00a0the CRA, with the Boundary Waters case being the latest example, Schlenker-Goodrich said. In 2017, the Trump administration invalidated 17 rules from the Obama era. In 2025 alone, Trump signed 22 CRA repeals.\u00a0<\/p> The CRA technically gives Congress 60 days to overturn a rule after it\u2019s passed. The Boundary Waters protections were passed over three years ago during the Biden<\/a> administration, and not as a rule, but rather as what is known as a public land order. This puts the Senate and administration in territory that is \u201cextraordinarily legally questionable,\u201d said Blaine Miller-McFeeley, a senior legislative representative at Earthjustice. \u201cWe are not done fighting, and there are a lot of open questions because this is such uncharted territory.\u201d\u00a0<\/p> \u201cIt allows Congress to basically do a thumbs up or a thumbs down, where otherwise a filibuster would apply.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure> The decision could set a dangerous precedent. Should the resolution be allowed to stand, it could\u00a0open up all land management decisions<\/a>\u00a0to political attacks. Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, for example, has proposed a CRA resolution to eliminate the resource management plan for the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.\u00a0<\/p> \u201cAll of these place-based attacks are occurring concurrently with talk on permitting reform,\u201d Schlenker-Goodrich pointed out. Signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, the\u00a0National Environmental Policy Act<\/a>, or NEPA, requires federal agencies to assess how large-scale developments would affect the environment before approving them. The policy has been an important tool for environmentalists, helping to halt or delay major industrial complexes or infrastructure. But in recent years, it has also curbed the deployment of solar and wind energy, as well as updates to the country\u2019s power grid required to accommodate new clean energy. Reforming NEPA has gained broad, bipartisan support in Congress, but when matched with this new use of the CRA, it could put protected areas in grave danger, Schlenker-Goodrich warned.\u00a0<\/p> The Trump administration\u2019s use of the CRA also effectively cuts tribal nations out of Boundary Waters negotiations. \u201cThree tribes \u2014 the Bois Forte Band, the Fond du Lac Band and the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa \u2014 have extensive treaty rights in northeastern Minnesota,\u201d New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich\u00a0said in remarks<\/a>\u00a0on the Senate floor. \u201cThese rights are guaranteed to them by the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe and have been reaffirmed by federal courts over and over again. By overturning the public land order with a CRA resolution, Senate Republicans will not only cut tribes out of the conversation. They disrespect tribal treaty rights and directly risk those tribes\u2019 guaranteed access to their traditional way of life and subsistence use of this place.\u201d<\/p> The mining ban repeal comes despite widespread opposition from environmentalists, outdoor recreation companies and neighboring communities. Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith spoke on the Senate floor for five hours on Wednesday night in an attempt to block the vote. \u201cThe Senate and House should follow the law,\u201d Smith said,\u00a0according to CBS News<\/a>. \u201cThey should follow the laws they wrote about how public land orders are treated in this country. I do not believe that happened here.\u201d\u00a0<\/p> The main winner out of the Boundary Waters debacle is Twin Metals, a subsidiary of Chilean mining outfit Antofagasta. The company fought under the first Trump administration to build a copper and\u00a0nickel\u00a0mine on the Duluth Complex, one of the world\u2019s largest undeveloped deposits of critical minerals located just 5 miles south of the Boundary Waters. At the time, the company was run by billionaire Andr\u00f3nico Luksic, who was criticized for his connections to the Trump family \u2014 specifically for renting a house in Washington, D.C., to Trump\u2019s daughter Ivanka. Although Luksic has since stepped down from Antofagasta\u2019s board, his family controls a majority stake in the company.\u00a0<\/p> \u201cThe corruption of rich individuals around the world is a big part of this,\u201d said Miller-McFeeley. So are data centers. Since retaking office, the administration has raced to ramp up domestic production of critical minerals \u2014 the materials that are required for computing, batteries, renewable energy, and military technology.\u00a0<\/p> Copper is critical to the artificial intelligence<\/a> boom. The analytics giant S&P Global\u00a0published a report<\/a>\u00a0earlier this year warning that copper demand was projected to expand 50% by 2040. Another\u00a0recent report<\/a>\u00a0from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace predicted a significant nickel deficit by 2035, due in large part to demand from the defense industry and the United States\u2019 \u201climited ability to increase domestic production.\u201d Crucially, the report recommended shoring up international partnerships, rather than opening up protected land to mining, and it will take much more than mining to make the U.S. self-reliant when it comes to critical minerals. The country currently has only three copper smelters and no nickel smelters, making production the real bottleneck. Antofagasta would likely \u201cship its product abroad to be processed and sold offshore, and then maybe resold back to the U.S.,\u201d said Miller-McFeeley.<\/p> Even if this is merely a test case for the administration to see how far they\u2019re able to push legal limits, it has once again set the federal government in opposition of its own researchers. \u201cThe U.S. Forest Service is 100% opposed to mining in this watershed,\u201d said Marc Fink, director of the Public Lands Law Center and a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. In 2016, the Forest Service\u00a0determined<\/a>\u00a0that a sulfide-ore copper mine, such as the one Twin Metals is proposing, could cause \u201cextreme\u201d and \u201cserious and irreplaceable harm\u201d to the area.\u00a0<\/p> \u201cThis clearly goes against the science and the administration\u2019s own agencies,\u201d Fink said. \u201cIt\u2019s a really unfortunate situation, but we\u2019ll definitely keep fighting.\u201d<\/p> The Boundary Waters bill will now head to President Trump\u2019s desk. He is expected to sign it.<\/p>\n The post Republicans Deployed a Little-Known Law to Open Minnesota Wilderness to Mining<\/a> appeared first on Truthdig<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\n
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boundary waters,Congressional Review Act,minnesota,National Environmental Policy Act,republicans\r\n
Source link www.truthdig.com<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Minnesota\u2019s Boundary Waters comprise a vast stretch of wilderness bordering Canada, with over 1 million acres of untouched forest and thousands of lakes and streams. Accessible largely by canoe, it is an ecological gem and one of the most popular spots in the country for outdoor recreation. On Thursday, Senate Republicans voted 50-49 to open the area up to mining…","protected":false},"author":415,"featured_media":1623,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_analytify_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[818,819,269,798,505],"class_list":["post-1622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-boundary-waters","tag-congressional-review-act","tag-minnesota","tag-national-environmental-policy-act","tag-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/415"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}