US Senate votes to reverse mining ban near Boundary Waters

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate voted 50-49 to reverse a 20-year mining ban near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on Thursday, April 16.

The vote nullifies a Public Land Order from 2023 by the Biden administration, which withdrew 225,504 acres of Superior National Forest lands from mineral and geothermal leasing. The area is in Minnesota’s Rainy River Watershed, which the protected Boundary Waters is located within, and contains deposits of copper, nickel and cobalt.

The bill, first introduced in the House by Republican Congressman Pete Stauber of the 8th District, now heads to President Donald Trump’s desk for a signature. All Senate Democrats and two Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — voted against the reversal. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri did not vote.

Minnesota’s Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith urged their colleagues to vote against the reversal. Smith debated on the Senate floor for hours late Wednesday night after the Senate voted 51-49 to proceed with voting on the reversal.

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“We know that you can support mining, but that does not mean that you support every mine in every place,” Smith said Thursday before the vote. “We can support the need for mining, but that doesn't mean that we mine on the edge of Chaco Canyon or on the rim of the Grand Canyon. And it does not mean that we think that a copper-sulfide mine on the doorstep of the Boundary Waters is a good idea.”

Stauber celebrated the Senate vote in a news release.

“A major victory for America and for Minnesota’s families and workers was secured today,” Stauber stated. “Never again can any Democrat President or administration unilaterally ban mining in this vital portion of the Superior National Forest, killing jobs and locking away trillions of dollars of critical minerals essential to our way of life. Mining is our past, our present, and our future — and the future looks bright!”

Twin Metals, a subsidiary of Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta, has been trying to mine in the Superior National Forest for decades. Taconite is mined there, but environmentalists say tailings from metal mining can be dangerous sources of toxic chemicals that would lead to pollution in the Rainy River Watershed.

Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico also debated against the reversal, arguing that the clean water and wilderness of the Boundary Waters should be safeguarded.

“Twenty percent of the National Forest Service system's fresh water is in these Boundary Waters, and we're going to pollute that with sulfuric acid?” Heinrich asked before the vote Thursday morning. “This company plans to dump millions of tons of waste rock on this site that will never be removed. It'll be sitting there waiting for the air and the water to turn that waste rock full of sulfides into sulfuric acid.”

Sulfide-ore mining is the strategy Twin Metals plans to use for its proposed mine southwest of Ely.

The mining method has not yet been done in Minnesota, but a 2019 University of Minnesota paper studying the effects of this type of mining elsewhere suggests the economic damages to the outdoor industry will likely outweigh benefits of the mine, if the wilderness is exposed to toxins like sulfuric acid.

The paper also suggests the negative impacts on water, fish and wild rice would degrade the resources of the 1854 Treaty Area, including the tribal homelands of the Bois Forte, Grand Portage and Fond du Lac bands.

"This mine is going to infringe on their hunting and fishing rights, their rights to harvest wild rice, but you're saying, ‘I'm not going to come down on that side of the scale,’” Smith said Thursday. “ ... Who's the winner here? You're going to come down on the side of a Chilean billionaire. A Chilean billionaire who owns the largest copper company in the whole world.”

Any mining projects would still have to undergo state and federal review, which would almost certainly take years. PolyMet, another copper-nickel project proposed in the region, began the environmental review process in 2005. A permit to mine was issued by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in 2018, before litigation reversed it in 2021. PolyMet, now NewRange Copper Nickel, has yet to open.

Stauber has repeatedly pointed to the fact the bill doesn’t allow mining within the Boundary Waters itself or a surrounding buffer zone, and it doesn’t weaken environmental safeguards.

“It [the bill] simply returns the decision to established permitting processes, where science, not politics, guides the outcome," Stauber's stated.

“I look forward to Minnesota’s miners and workers meeting every state and federal requirement so they can responsibly source the critical minerals, helium, and other natural resources that allow us to compete in the 21st century. We cannot continue to allow foreign adversaries like China to dominate mineral supply chains that are essential to our economic and national security.”

Smith and her colleagues have warned that Antofagasta has what they described as a “sweetheart’s deal” with Chinese ore processors, suggesting that the ore mined in the Superior National Forest would likely be processed and sold by China.

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Klobuchar warned of the precedent the Senate was setting with this action, and how public lands everywhere could come under threat.

“Secretaries of the Interior have long had the ability to issue public land orders to reserve federal land for specific uses, setting it aside for things like infrastructure, certain military purposes, training, border security, protection and yes, conservation," Klobuchar said.

"Today, the CRA [Congressional Review Act] before the Senate is being used simply as a way of revoking the land withdrawal without having to conduct the level of public engagement that's expected.”

Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress has the authority to review and disapprove of federal actions within 60 Senate session days of the action’s submission to Congress. If a joint resolution of disapproval addressing a federal action is passed by both chambers and signed by the president, it is nullified and ceases to have effect.

Also, when a federal action is successfully disapproved of by Congress, the executive branch is prohibited from taking a substantially similar action in the future.

Democrats have argued that the Biden administration properly notified Congress of the ban in 2023 and therefore, the timeline to reverse it had expired.