WASHINGTON - House Republicans today passed their latest giveaway to highly profitable companies - this time to the mining industry - while allowing the industry to skirt tax and royalty payments to the American people. The bill would short circuit proper environmental review and therefore provide a financial windfall for large companies mining for gold, silver, uranium and potentially even coal on public lands. The Republican bill is also drafted in such a way that sand, gravel, clay and other common products actually count as “strategic" minerals for the United States.
“In this latest giveaway to corporations, Republicans claim that sand, gravel, stone and clay are ‘strategic’ minerals, ushering in a new ‘Stone Age’ in the United States," said Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee. “This bill isn’t giving us the futuristic technologies of the Jetsons, it’s giving us the prehistoric technologies of the Flinstones."
The Republican mining giveaway bill would short circuit the environmental review process under the National Environmental Policy Act, and elevate mining above all other uses of public lands, like grazing, recreation, fishing or other activities.
During debate on the bill, Republicans protected mining companies that are delinquent on their taxes, voting down a Democratic motion to prohibit mining companies from receiving new taxpayer-owned land if they were also late in paying their taxes to the American people.
Republicans also voted down an amendment offered by Rep. Markey that would require a royalty payment to the taxpayer of 12.5 percent of the value of minerals such as gold, silver and uranium mined on federal lands. Under current law, mining companies pay no royalties to mine these types of minerals on federal lands whatsoever
