Bruce Westerman: “With all due respect to my friend from New Mexico, I greatly appreciate her passion to protect this administration, to…”

“With all due respect to my friend from New Mexico, I greatly appreciate her passion to protect this administration, to protect an administration that is having an attack on American mining, on American energy that is causing prices to increase, for inflation to go up, and it is causing us to be more dependent on our adversaries like China for minerals and elements, like Russia, OPEC, Venezuela, all of the above, Iran, for our energy. I understand that she is passionate about that, and I respect her passion. When we talk about an old, archaic mining law that Ulysses S. Grant signed into law in 1872, I am reminded of something our Founders did long before that. In 1787, they passed or established our Constitution that says that there is separation of powers, that the legislative branch legislates and that the executive branch enforces. Now, almost 250 years later, we have got an administrative branch, and thanks to the administrative state in the Administrative Powers Act, we have bureaucrats that think their job is to legislate. We are not changing the law, the mining law. We are pushing back on rules that are being pushed out by an administration that thinks it is their job to legislate. I will remind my friends across the aisle that 2 years ago, they controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. They had an opportunity to change the mining law, and they didn't do it. We are not changing the mining law.…”