Republicans passed a bill Thursday to allow mining on hundreds of thousands of acres of previously protected wilderness in Minnesota, in a move that could forever alter congressional oversight over government rulemaking and public lands.
The Senate voted 50-49 to send the measure, recently approved by the House, to the president’s desk. It reverses a 20-year mining moratorium enacted by the Biden administration in 2023, covering over roughly 350 square miles near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Only two Republicans voted against the bill, despite bipartisan concerns about the precedent it set for a future Democratic administration to block mining and fossil fuel exploration across the country.
“An activist, liberal administration could ride roughshod through a lot of our states, particularly more rural states that have large parcels of land and land agreements in place,” Sen. Thom Tillis, one of those Republicans, told NOTUS.