House Passes Bill Blocking Presidents From Banning Oil, Gas Drilling
Drill, baby, drill!
Why can’t all bills be as short as H.R. 26?
H.R. 26 is the “Protecting American Energy Production Act.”
It’s simple, too. No future president can block oil and gas drilling without Congress’s approval:
SEC. 2. Protecting American energy production.
(a) Sense of Congress.—It is the sense of Congress that States should maintain primacy for the regulation of hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas production on State and private lands.
(b) Prohibition on declaration of a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the President may not declare a moratorium on the use of hydraulic fracturing unless such moratorium is authorized by an Act of Congress.
Sixteen Democrats voted for the bill.
“House Republicans are putting an end to the Democrats’ war on American energy. Today’s passage of the Protecting American Energy Production Act helps restore American energy dominance and protects the jobs of hardworking men and women,” said Speaker Johnson. “This bill ensures fracking will remain an essential tool in our nation’s energy production, allowing us to harness regions like the Permian Basin rather than turning to foreign adversaries for our energy needs, and helping to fully unleash America’s energy potential.”
Former President Joe Biden’s administration took many steps to stop oil and natural gas drilling in America.
Right before he left office, Biden banned offshore drilling along the East and West coasts, totaling 625 million acres. He justified the move under Section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.
Biden Interior Secretary Deb Haaland banned drilling on 28 million acres of public lands in Alaska.
Haaland also ticked off New Mexico Native Americans when she banned drilling near an indigenous site for 20 years because they often leased those lands to energy companies.
In other words, it helped their economy:
There are currently 53 Indian allotments located in the so-called 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Canyon, generating $6.2 million per year in royalties for an estimated 5,462 allottees, according to the Navajo Nation. In addition, there are 418 unleased allotments in the zone that are associated with more than 16,000 allottees.
“We are very poor. It’s like living in a third world. No help from the government, no help from the tribe,” Jean Armenta, another Navajo citizen with allotted land, told Fox News Digital. “A lot of us don’t have electricity or running water.”
“I’m for drilling, I’m for drilling,” she added. “People need the money.”
The administration also implemented the most restrictive offshore drilling plan, proposing only three offshore drilling permits through 2029.
Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Bergum immediately addressed the bans on Monday, his day on the job.
“Today marks the beginning of an exciting chapter for the Department of the Interior,” Burgum declared. “We are committed to working collaboratively to unlock America’s full potential in energy dominance and economic development to make life more affordable for every American family while showing the world the power of America’s natural resources and innovation. Together, we will ensure that our policies reflect the needs of our communities, respect tribal sovereignty, and drive innovation that will keep the U.S. at the forefront of energy and environmental leadership.”
The list includes revoking Biden’s move to ban offshore drilling along the East and West coasts.
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Comments
Energy is crucial to making America great, to prosperity.
Awesome!
This is the sort of legislation we need. They need to tighten up the border rules and so-called asylum applications (limiting it to a tiny concrete number over the fiscal year) and put some serious punishments on any executive or executive branch toadie who violates them.
I’d like to see a major increase in the resources allocated to processing legal immigration and the numbers allowed. We need to shift incentives.
Massive increase in 2025-2028 USFS national forest timber sales. Remove onerous regulations to spur growth in regional, small sawmill operations. We need American made, inexpensive, finished lumber; tariff Mexican and Canadian finished lumber products.
Our timber manufacturing industry moved to Mexico when the Clinton administration/environmentalists regulated and lawfared small operators out of existence.
Canadian and huge American operators like Weyerhaeuser, Sierra-Pacific and Louisiana-Pacific benefited massively. It was a purposeful way to kill the small sawmills.
I think Louisiana-Pacific moved all of its OSB manufacturing to Mexico 25+ years ago.
Question: What is the cost of a sheet/unit of 4×8 OSB at your local lumber yard?
There is still an LP plant near me. They have 5 or 6 locations in the US and a few in Canada.
Remember the “Spotted Owl”? It was used to close the timberlands and prevent cutting. They only live in “old growth” trees. One was found nesting in a Safeway market sign in Bend, Oregon. Remember the idiots staying in the tops of trees? The others chained to logging trucks? Damaging the skidders at the logging sites? That’s why the companies moved out.
Does this really do much? Can’t a new lefty POTUS just refuse to issue leases?
The whole point seems to be to give the power to drill or not to the States themselves. So if a State wants to issue leases then they can…maybe even for Federal land?? 🤔
This is the way.
This is the way.
I’m all for rescinding the arbitrary cancellation of offshore leases but I read at the time Trump was doing it that there was a question of whether or not a President can rescind that order. Has that been resolved or was it just complaining from the left?
If the ‘Antiquity Act’ was the means used then maybe not. There’s a straightforward power granted from Congress to the President to make the designation but not an explicit corresponding power to reverse or even revise by the same or a future President. A power of reversal is merely implied at best. Congress could probably vote to overturn something done under Antiquity Act and they could expand the power of the Executive to revise or reverse a prior decision.
If a President can’t rescind an Executive Order, the original order was not legally valid.
A layman wonders about the powers of the different branches. If a power can be irrevocably ceded to another branch, then the capacity exists to totally divest one branch of all its powers forever, rendering it a nonentity. It seems logical that no power properly residing in one branch can ever be ceded to another.