Bush admin. to strip land protection power from Congress

In a regulatory jujitsu move, the Bush administration is seeking to abolish a rule used earlier this year by the Democrat-controlled House natural resources committee to withdraw more than a million acres near the Grand Canyon from uranium exploration.

The Interior Department calls the rule — which allows the both the Senate and House committees to issue “emergency declarations” to protect threatened wilderness — redundant.

But the timing is more than a bit suspicious, coming as it does only a few weeks after environmental groups sued the Secretary of the Interior Dick Kempthorne over Interior’s failure to stop granting exploration permits to uranium mining companies near the Canyon.

Taylor McKinnon, public lands program director for the Center for Biological Diversity, who I spoke with last Friday, calls the move a fairly transparent response to a string of victories by environmentalists.

“I don’t hesitate to say that this is a response to the emergency withdrawal at Grand Canyon, and our lawsuit against Secretary Kempthorne challenging his defiance of that,” he tells me.

(For more background about uranium mining near Grand Canyon, check out this post from a few weeks ago)

Interior — and the Bureau of Land Management, which they oversee — argue that places like the Grand Canyon are already protected by federal laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and others. The AP has a response from BLM here.

Not so, says McKinnon.

“If that were true, all the uranium development of the 1980s would have happened without incident,” he says.

He points to a mine accident in 1984 that led to four tons of uranium ore washing through various tributaries and into Grand Canyon and the Colorado River.

It was incidents like that which led to the rules allowing Congress to withdraw lands unilaterally.

“We would be foolish to trust them again,” he says.

An interesting side note to this circus is the fact that the last-minute rule change is in direct contradiction to a memo issued by White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolton earlier this year.

The memo says that last-minute regulatory changes are not going to be tolerated.

“Except in extraordinary circumstances, regulations to be finalized in this Administration should be proposed no later than June 1, 2008, and final regulations should be issued no later than November 1, 2008,” it reads.

What happened?

“They lied,” says McKinnon.

What else is new?

John Collins Rudolf (photo credit: Me)