Mining Regulatory Clarity Act of 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. STAUBER. Mr. Speaker, I rise to support H.R. 2925, the bipartisan, bicameral Mining Regulatory Clarity Act of 2023, offered by my good friend from Nevada, Representative Amodei. I thank Representative Amodei for introducing this legislation.

Nevada and Minnesota are both mineral-rich States, and they are both States that the Biden administration has targeted as part of their antimining agenda.

The bill before us is simple. It codifies what is known as the Rosemont fix. It restores the longstanding interpretation of the Mining Law of 1872, along with agency regulations governing hardrock mining policy on our Federal lands.

In May of 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upended decades of said law when it affirmed a lower court decision revoking an approved mine plan for the Rosemont Copper mine project.

The decision limited the ability of the Forest Service to approve necessary mining support facilities and activity, which is necessary for mining operations. This decision from the Ninth Circuit put virtually every new domestic mining project in jeopardy.

During our legislative hearing earlier this year, an official from the Biden administration argued that it won't be necessary to codify the Rosemont fix into law simply because of an existing solicitor's opinion from last year that he argued addressed the issue at hand.

However, this same witness also admitted the obvious. The solicitor's opinion can be rescinded or changed with the stroke of a pen. The solicitor's opinion is an administrative action that can be undone or changed at the whim of this or any future administration.

We all know the durability of administrative actions. These actions are law of the land for 4, maybe 8 years in some cases.

Mr. Speaker, considering domestic mining projects are multidecade investments, why would a mining company ever decide to invest billions of dollars in a project when they are only guaranteed 4 or perhaps 8 years of regulatory clarity? That is why the bicameral, bipartisan Mining Regulatory Clarity Act is necessary.

The only way to fix the Rosemont decision is to codify the fix in law. This legislation, contrary to what some of my colleagues will argue, won't radically change or create new domestic mining policy. It simply builds regulatory certainty and reinstates the longstanding interpretation of the Mining Law of 1872 and longstanding agency regulations that were the law of the land before 2022.

We are all well aware of the Biden administration's ambitious goals to transition to renewable energy and other technologies that rely on critical and rare earth minerals.

Mr. Speaker, if we can't mine these minerals domestically, thanks, in part, to the Rosemont decision blocking new domestic mines, where does the administration expect these minerals to come from? The only answer I can think of is adversarial nations like China.

Continued lack of clarity on the Rosemont decision is not a benefit to the American people but a benefit to the Chinese Communist Party.

The answer is pretty clear. You can either support domestic mining with the strictest environmental and labor standards here in the United States and across the world, or you can support Chinese Communist Party-controlled mineral supplies that have zero environmental standards, zero labor standards, and they use child and forced slave labor. That is a fact.

I urge my colleagues to support this bill, Mr. Speaker.

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