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Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, the story of America is the story of a people that looked upon the West and saw promise. Where others saw wilderness, Americans saw a future. They dammed rivers that had flowed ungoverned since creation, mined mountains that had defied the reach of man, and turned harsh plains into fields that would feed a continent. From that audacity came a republic that could feed itself, power itself, and then, when tested, defend itself.

The Federal Land Policy and Management Act--known commonly as FLPMA-- enshrined this principle of multiple use and sustained yield for Federal lands. It codified the promise that the land belongs to the people and ought therefore to serve them. Its promise was plural: energy, grazing, recreation, timber conservation--each coexisting with the others in balanced and productive harmony. The law does not permit Federal officials to choose one purpose to the exclusion of all the rest. It demands balance, and it demands use in particular.

But the Biden administration's clerics of the green new scam disregarded that agreement struck nearly half a century ago. They preferred a museum to a nation, an America under glass, admired but untouchable. Under their edicts, vast stretches of land--millions upon millions of acres--have been sealed off from the citizens who built their livelihoods upon them. In Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska, communities that have mined, grazed, and worked for generations are now treated as trespassers in their own story. Their supposed crime is self-reliance--hardly something we should be seeking to punish. Their punishment is unemployment.

The Senate now faces three resolutions that would help restore the balance. Each disapproves of a Biden administration decision that violated the multiple-use mandate of FLPMA and locked away public land from productive Americans, contrary to FLPMA's promise.

In Montana, for example, the Miles City Resource Management Plan barred future coal leasing across nearly 2 million acres, erasing access to 338 million tons of clean domestic coal. In North Dakota, more than 4 million acres of Federal coal reserves were closed--nearly 99 percent of the reserves available in that State. In Alaska, the Central Yukon Resource Management Plan imposed new restrictions on 56 million acres of land, including millions of acres newly labeled as ``areas of critical environmental concern''--one of the great trick plays used by the left in order to bring about de facto wilderness or de facto monument designations without actually having to go through the process that the relevant laws would require.

Joe Biden's bureaucrats wrote over the voices of those who actually live near that land and live with the consequences of these bad decisions, and the results were predictable: higher costs, lost jobs, and deeper dependence on nations that, to put it mildly, do not wish us well.

Every shuttered mine, every idled rig is an act of self-imposed amnesia--a willful type of forgetting of what made America both prosperous and free.

Now, luckily, President Trump and Secretary Burgum are correcting that course. They are returning resource management plans to their proper role under the law; that is, to manage the land responsibly and keep it working for the American people, the intended beneficiaries of those lands.

The Congressional Review Act allows us, mercifully, to repeal these unlawful plans and restore the statutory balance Congress intended and Congress, in fact, created with the Congressional Review Act.

When these resolutions of disapproval take effect, after they have been passed and signed into law by President Trump, the Bureau of Land Management will still have the necessary environmental analysis to issue new resource management plans that are consistent with the law and the clear intent of Congress--plans that open access where it was previously closed, respect local voices that were previously ignored, and bring Federal management back within its legal bounds. That is how the process should work. That is how it is supposed to work. Under the law as written, it is how it does work.

It is, at least, how it always should have worked but didn't work under the Biden administration, like so many other things.

Now Republicans are defending the right of a free people here--the right of a free people to power their own future, to determine their own course. Democrats are still genuflecting before the alter of the green new scam, clinging to their faith and their false hope that if only Americans grow poorer, the planet will somehow grow purer.

In that same spirit of self-righteous delusion, this week, Democrats are yet again bringing forth a measure to denounce President Trump for declaring an energy emergency. It is a gesture so unserious, it would be comical if it weren't so dangerous.

At the very moment when the world is entering an energy race that will decide who commands the engines of artificial intelligence and all that goes along with it, who manufactures the tools of war, and who will feed and defend their people, Democrats have instead chosen to strike a pose. They are congratulating themselves for denying the existence of the fire while standing in the smoke and holding the matches. Theirs is the politics of aesthetic virtue: better to be cold and appear righteous than to be warm and competent.

But the American people fortunately are not fools. They understand that we can no longer afford to pad the pockets of Democratic allies propping up unreliable industries that cannot--no matter how hard Democrats wish it were otherwise--cannot keep the lights on, while punishing the workers and the communities that can and will if only we will allow it without undue interference from the U.S. Government.

These resolutions to overturn the reckless Biden-era land plans are part of that larger defense. They would restore lawful management of public lands, honor the voices of those who live nearest to them and are therefore most directly affected by them, and keep faith with the law Congress enacted.

Nations that lose their memory soon lose their nerve. The same spirit that split the Rockies and bridged the Golden Gate cannot be reconciled with a bureaucracy that measures virtue by paralysis.

America, in short, was not built by those who made idols of the land but by those who worked it and in so doing, ennobled both themselves and it.

We cannot continue to bow to the Ashtoreth of climate alarmism and bow to the Moloch of ecoterrorism and pretend that is going to work out well for America. Americans know better.

Rewinding these management plans will not desecrate the environment-- far from it--but they will deliver it from an orthodoxy that mistakes idleness for piety, reminding us that liberty, like the land itself, withers when left untouched.

It is therefore with all the energy and enthusiasm that I am capable of communicating that I invite my colleagues to do the right thing--to vote for these resolutions of disapproval and to right the gross wrong that has been inflicted on the American people, particularly Americans in and around the States affected by these ill-designed, ill-conceived resource management plans.

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