The Destruction Of The Boundary Waters Is Nigh:

Should that vote prove successful, and should the man who just anointed himself the second coming sign it into law, that measure will repeal the U.S. Forest Service Land Management Plan governing 225,504 acres of national forest in northern Minnesota. The current land management plan includes a mineral leasing withdraw that’s preventing Chile’s biggest mining company from building a heavily-polluting copper mine smack dab on top of the headwaters for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. And if that gets built a process will begin that will eventually destroy that area’s currently pristine ecosystem by dumping sulfuric acid into it.

That’s incredibly stupid not only because destroying America’s most popular wilderness area will cause more economic harm to the region than the income it will net, but also because all of that is being done in order to give Minnesota’s copper to China, so it can continue to build out its renewable power grid, and continue to race ahead of America on the development of artificial intelligence.

I dove into all that in more detail at this link.

Because Republicans are using the Congressional Review Act to get around the filibuster, and disapprove of that LMP with a simple majority vote, the other thing their success will do is permanently shift all USFS LMPs into being legally considered agency “rules,” which must be approved by Congress. Because the CRA is retroactive, that will apply to any LMP written since 1996, and any permit issued as part of one. Any standing LMP or permit issued since 1996 may no longer be valid should this vote be successful. And the CRA specifically prohibits any “substantially” similar replacement, so not only could this grind industrial operations on USFS land to a halt as all of this winds its way through federal court, but it could also set USFS the task of re-doing 30 years of work, and force them to start from scratch. LMPs usually take about two to three years of research, public hearings, and stakeholder input to create. And the crazy thing is that this is the exact problem they’ve already created for the BLM, with some legal experts stating that move also applies to USFS. But, a yes vote here would definitively apply that same problem to USFS.