Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time to close. Mr. Speaker, proponents of H.R. 2925 would like to argue that this bill is a surgical fix to a problem created by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision on the Rosemont Copper Mine. If this is surgery, then like the mining law of 1872, it is surgery with an ax, not a scalpel. If that evokes an image for you of our post-Civil War surgical maneuvers, then that is what this bill does because it takes away guardrails to protect our communities. Let's clarify. In 2022, a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that the proposed Rosemont mine in southern Arizona could not use invalid mining claims to permanently bury Colorado's thousands of acres of national forests in mining waste, including sites that were sacred to multiple Tribes. The court ruled that it was not a valid mining claim to do this. The requirement that mining claims must contain valuable minerals for the claim to be valid is a core tenet of the mining law. It is the one, as we have said, fragile guardrail that we have in this antiquated law. For over 150 years, the mining law of 1872 has given mining precedence over all other uses and values of our public lands. This imbalance of power has left a toxic trail of pollution, destruction, and desecration of sacred sites, and it continues to impact our communities today. We urgently need to reform the mining law.…”