The complex truth

 

Rep. Tenney is not giving us the truth about her votes, but pitches the reasoning simply in hopes that we’ll accept her claims. 

Back in mid-November, Rep. Tenney voted for HJR130, a resolution that opens 800,000 acres of Wyoming land and 4.7 million acres of mineral rights managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to mining.  Her newsletter stated she voted yes because “Critical mineral resource access is a national security priority, and this resolution is a necessary reversal against the Biden administration’s broader agenda of locking up public lands and stifling domestic industrial capacity”.  

Too simple to be true.

Let’s look at that.

The more complex truth is that the BLM’s 2015 Resource Management Plan (RMP), under the Obama administration, permitted mining.  

However, that mining was found by a court to violate the National Environmental Policy Act. 

The Western Organization of Resource Councils sued the BLM when the plan was made public.  In resolving the case the court held that the National Environmental Policy Act requires BLM to evaluate climate impacts of federal coal leasing in that region and include alternatives to limit or stop coal leasing. To comply with the court directive, the BLM made BLM-Managed coal resources in the relevant area unavailable for future leasing in the in 2024 amended RMP.

There are nevertheless some simpler truths that are at odds with Tenney’s claims

The BLM land was open to public use. This bill actually locks much of it away from the public for the sole use of private interests. 

The Biden administration encouraged domestic industrial capacity, focused on industries that will be successful in the future rather than trying to reclaim a past that is irretrievably gone. 

The bill is a giveaway to international mining companies at the expense of the American people. 

It was not, as Rep. Tenney noted in her newsletter, a “necessary reversal against the Biden administration’s broader agenda of locking up public lands and stifling domestic industrial capacity”. 

Tenney’s constituents deserve hearing the real reasons for her positions and votes. Is she making decisions because she believes the lies, or because she thinks we will?