#hjr140 — Public Fediverse posts

The Senate Vote on HJR 140 Is Not a Green Light to Mine Near the Boundary Waters, and There are Ways to Remedy the Harm Done

Two days before the Senate voted last week to overturn the 20-year Rainy River Watershed Withdrawal, I sent this letter to the Globe and Mail:

Nathan Vanderklippe’s reporting on the effort to undo the 20-year Boundary Waters mining moratorium (“In Minnesota’s wilderness, a town divided over the future of mining,” Globe and Mail 13 April 2026) lets the cheaters off the hook too easily. House Joint Resolution 140, which would overturn the 20-year Rainy River Watershed Mineral Withdrawal, represents “an outrageous abuse” of the legislative process, in the words of Congresswoman Emily Randall. Many (but perhaps not enough) US lawmakers agree. The measure recklessly hands over a cherished American wilderness to Antofagasta, a foreign mining company with a poor environmental record owned by a billionaire Trump crony; it would also foreclose scientific study of the effects of sulfide mining on the Boundary Waters. The pattern set during Trump’s first term now continues apace: capture the agencies, stifle the science, and let the mining company set the rules. 

On Thursday, the cheaters got their way. 

If there is one positive thing to come out of this disgraceful little episode, it’s that in the run-up to the Senate vote and in its immediate aftermath, the issue of copper and nickel mining on the edge of the Boundary Waters got some of the national attention it has long deserved.

However, much of the reporting and commentary confused, or came close to confusing, the vote to overturn the moratorium on sulfide mining with the permitting of Antofagasta’s Twin Metals project. That is still a long way off. Even careful and reliable narrators like Heather Cox Richardson said that the vote “clears the way for a subsidiary of Chilean mining giant Antofagasta to engage in copper-sulfide mining, which produces sulfuric acid, above the pristine BWCA”. It does nothing of the sort. 

What this reckless vote did was change the state of play on two fronts.

First, it restored the status quo ante Biden. With the withdrawal overturned, the Bureau of Land Management can now renew Twin Metals’ Preference Rights Lease Applications and review its Mine Plan of Operations. And we can be pretty certain that these new agency reviews will be yet another exercise in foregone conclusions. The agencies will not only decide things in the company’s favor, but also aggressively move to permit the mine.

Second, passage of HJR 140 solved a problem the company was having at court. In Twin Metals v. US, the court confirmed that the Bureau of Land Management had to deny Twin Metals’ Preference Rights Lease Applications and reject its Mine Plan of Operations; due to the mineral withdrawal, the area was off limits to copper and nickel mining. Now it’s not. Though the case is currently on hold until October of 2026, it may actually be moot. Antofagasta’s lawyers were not having much success, anyway. 

So the vote put things in a worrisome state, but Antofagasta still has a long way to go before it can put shovels in the ground and start shipping ore from Ely to China. 

Incorrectly framing the vote as a green light to mine is not only misleading, it signals (perhaps unintentionally) that this battle is lost and it’s time to move on to the next battle – whatever that may be. I would of course urge people to stick with this battle, or at least keep tabs on it, not only for the sake of protecting the Boundary Waters wilderness, but also because (as I have tried to argue for the past several years) there is a lot to learn from this one case about the harms done to the public interest by unchecked corruption and cronyism as well as the larger authoritarian project to dismantle modern American government known as Project 2025. 

This is not at all a stretch. Overturning the mineral withdrawal was an explicit goal of Project 2025. The scheme was laid out on page 523 of the playbook: the mineral withdrawal and other public land withdrawals should be abandoned “if those withdrawals have not been completed.”  What Pete Stauber found – or what Antofagasta’s lobbyists no doubt found for him – was a way to claim that the mineral withdrawal had not been completed. Congress, Stauber said, had not been notified (even though he received a letter notifying him of the withdrawal and raised a ruckus when the withdrawal was announced). He used, or, as Representative Emily Randall would say, abused the Congressional Review Act to make good on that false claim.

Thursday morning’s vote did a lot of damage, but it’s hardly the end of the story. There are still chances to remedy the harm done, but it will take close scrutiny of every step that the administration makes from here on in: the attempt to renew the mineral leases, the effort to approve the Twin Metals mine plan, whatever moves are left to make in Twin Metals v. US, and so on. This is a coordinated political project with lots of moving parts. Antofagasta’s lobbyists – led by Trump’s former Secretary of the Interior, David Bernhardt – are doing most of the coordinating behind closed doors. People who care about the Boundary Waters, or good government, or who just don’t like seeing cheaters win, need to track their movements and call out the cheating at every step.

And there are positive steps that can be taken, not just at the state but also at the federal level. Just last year, for example, Senator Tina Smith introduced the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection Act. Had it passed, it would have made the 20-year mineral withdrawal permanent. Now that act needs updating, and it should be on the legislative agenda for 2027, should the Democrats regain control of Congress or even one house of Congress. More broadly still, protections not just for the Boundary Waters but for all public lands and waters should be a feature of Project 2029, or whatever you want to call the collective effort to clean up our current mess, hold malefactors accountable, and build 21st-century government in the public interest.

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The Chilean billionaire who wants to mine copper and nickel near the Boundary Waters can’t even be bothered to pay his DC sewer bill?

Law professor and ethics watchdog Richard Painter put it bluntly back in 2019:

Jared and Ivanka’s landlord — a billionaire from Chile who rents them their mansion in D.C. — will use the Boundary Waters as his toilet. Pro-sulfide mining politicians in Minnesota and Washington are handing him the washroom key.

Seven years later, the key to the billionaire’s commode is now turning in the lock. House Joint Resolution 140 will open the door. Meanwhile, as the above notice of delinquency indicates, this same Chilean billionaire has been using Washington DC’s waters and sewers, and the people charged with managing his toilet can’t even be bothered to see that the water bill is paid on time. 

The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority — whose motto reminds us that “Water is Life” —issued this notice to the owner of 2449 Tracy Place NW back in November. The property in question is the Kalorama mansion purchased for $5.5 million right after the 2016 election by Andronico Luksic Craig, the billionaire whose family also controls Antofagasta plc, the foreign mining conglomerate currently pushing to mine copper and nickel on the edge of the Boundary Waters. 

Luksic rented the Tracy Place NW mansion to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump for the duration of Trump’s first term while Antofagasta’s lawyers, lobbyists, and executives worked behind closed doors with administration officials to undo environmental protections and advance the Twin Metals mine. Despite serious public concern about foreign emoluments and other improprieties, no formal ethics review of the Kalorama rental arrangement was ever undertaken. It was, at best, a not-so-subtle influence operation, a form of corruption that today can seem almost quaint (but that hardly makes it excusable). Nowadays, Luksic could just arrange a meeting at the White House and present Trump with a gilded copper chamberpot.

Luksic continued to hold the Kalorama rental property after Trump’s first term violently unraveled and Jared and Ivanka fled DC. These days, the billionaire’s lawyers are supposed to be managing Tracy DC Real Estate (a Luksic front, one of many) and the the Kalorama property. They appear to be negligent or inattentive managers. In 2019, they failed to renew the required business license for the rental property on time; then in 2023, they simply “abandoned” the business license. The matter was referred to enforcement. 

So this latest infraction appears to be part of a pattern of neglect, and I would suggest that the pattern merits some serious consideration. In other words, I don’t think I’m just taking cheap shots here. In Washington DC, Luksic is an absent rent-seeker, as he would be in Minnesota; and in DC, it seems, his property managers can’t be arsed to comply with local codes and ordinances. His Minnesota managers might do better, or not; but the irresponsible oversight of the Kalorama property does nothing to assuage concern. (Much the same could be said about the significant fines another Luksic enterprise incurred for unauthorized water extraction at Agricola El Cerrito in April 2025).

DC has had to chase down Tracy DC Real Estate for operating the Kalorama property without a license; and the city has had to place a lien against the property in order to collect what is owed for water and sewage management. This is not exactly the conduct of a model citizen or someone with a commitment to the District of Columbia. It’s what we might expect from an absentee landlord.

And that is essentially what Minnesota and the country will get with the Twin Metals mine: an absent owner from a faraway place and a group of hired managers on the ground. Antofagasta might hire the most qualified managers at the Twin Metals mine, and I’m sure they will say that they have; but even the best managers are employees, not owners. With ownership comes responsibility.

The absentee, rent-seeking model of resource extraction is especially concerning when it comes to sulfide mining, where responsible local water management is critical in order to prevent – or at least try to prevent – acid mine drainage and other toxic pollution. Only last month, in fact, the Chilean government fined Antofagasta $775,000 for failing to comply with water management rules. Will our regulators ever be so diligent?

Think of it this way: a copper and nickel mine is, among other things, a sewer. It can, and in most cases will, drain, leak, or discharge pollutants for decades after the mine has closed and the owner has absconded with the profits.

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What Happens to the Appeal in Twin Metals v. US if the Senate Passes HJR 140?

Forbes Magazine has excerpted and posted the same moment from the Rules Committee hearing on House Joint Resolution 140 that I did the other day: Pete Stauber’s embarrassing concession that he brings HJR 140 on behalf of a Chilean conglomerate, a foreign company that will ship Minnesota’s ore to China for processing. This was just minutes after the congressman gravely warned that “China, our adversary,” has a “stranglehold” over critical and rare earth minerals.

A publication like Forbes has a lot more reach than I could ever hope to have, so it’s too bad they didn’t offer a little context and commentary to help people understand some of what’s at stake in this exchange, the anti-scientific posture Stauber’s resolution takes, and the abuse of legislative process it represents. I don’t believe that’s well or widely understood.

(I also think there could be a lot more reporting on the various ways that the play for the mineral resources of the Duluth Complex intersect with what’s happening in Minneapolis right now, but that’s a another story, one I started to grapple with here.)

The House passed HJR 140 on Wednesday. Should the resolution of disapproval pass in the Senate, HJR 140 will improve Twin Metals’ North American prospects. By how much is hard to say. This resolution does not permit the mine. As Stauber reminded everyone at the hearing, Antofagasta will still have to take its Twin Metals project through the normal channels of review. (In the hearing, Democrats rightly balked at this suggestion, noting that those channels and the agencies that run them are now captured or seriously compromised.) Advocacy groups, too, have tried to assure supporters that this doesn’t mean that Twin Metals can start building its mine on the edge of the Boundary Waters. It doesn’t. But the legislation will knock down some formidable barriers, most immediately at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

A little refresher. In September of 2023, Judge Christoper Cooper dismissed Twin Metals v. US on two grounds: the mining company had come to the wrong court, and it had no claim. HJR 140 could solve one of these issues for Antofagasta — the lack of a claim — and it might just render the case moot.

It seemed pretty clear that the mining company was going to lose its appeal of Cooper’s decision. They tried to delay oral argument, to no avail. Argument at the DC Circuit was held in January of 2025, and the outlook did not change. But what the mining company could not accomplish at law they could now accomplish by other means. Trump was inaugurated just one week after oral argument. Then the federal government did an about-face, took the mining company’s side in the dispute, and won a motion for abeyance. That put the case on hold until October. In October, the Chilean conglomerate and the US government went back to the court and asked for more time. Now the whole matter is on hold until April of this year.

So Stauber’s resolution comes at an incredibly opportune moment, just months before the mining company has to go back to court. How its passage will play into Twin Metals v. US is clear. In the 2023 case that is now on appeal, Judge Cooper ruled that the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to deny Antofagasta’s Preference Right Lease Applications and to reject its Mine Plan of Operations was lawful because the Biden administration had withdrawn the lands in question. If the Senate now joins the House to disapprove the Public Land Order authorizing the 20-year mineral withdrawal, voila: the agencies’ hands are now untied. The Bureau of Land Management will have new legal basis, or at least legal cover, for reviewing and approving the Lease Applications and the Mine Plan of Operations.

This is not just serendipity. It looks like a fairly well-coordinated scheme, one that I suspect was put together by the Bernhardt Group, but I don’t have the records to make that case persuasively. Watch for Antofagasta’s motion to dismiss their appeal at the DC Circuit once the agencies start to deliver.

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