On Thursday, the U.S. Senate voted 50–49 along mostly partisan lines to overturn a Biden-era, 20-year moratorium protecting more than 225,000 acres of Minnesota’s Superior National Forest from sulfide-ore copper mining. The resolution now heads to President Trump, who is expected to sign it, clearing the way for Twin Metals Minnesota — a subsidiary of Chilean mining giant Antofagasta — to resume permitting for a copper-nickel mine just miles upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. That’s a Minnesota story. But the mechanism used to gut those protections is very much a Washington State story.
Congress acted through the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law designed to check federal rule-making. Traditionally used for regulatory actions, it was deployed here to nullify a public land withdrawal order, a move critics called legally unprecedented. Because CRA resolutions bypass the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold, Republicans needed only a simple majority. Both Minnesota Democratic senators and two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins and Thom Tillis, warned that the tactic sets a dangerous precedent: any future Congress could use the same tool to unwind settled public lands protections across the country.
Why Washington Should Be Watching Closely. Washington State is home to some of the most protected federal lands in the nation, from the Olympic National Forest and the North Cascades to wilderness areas in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and the Colville. Many of those protections exist through executive mineral withdrawals, land-use management plans, and agency orders that now appear newly vulnerable to CRA challenge.
Tribes across the Pacific Northwest also have treaty rights tied to the health of forests and waterways, rights that mirror the concerns raised in Minnesota, where the White Earth Nation and other tribes opposed the mine, citing the threat to wild rice harvesting and fishing. Washington’s tribal nations are watching.
The outdoor recreation economy, a major driver in communities throughout the South Sound and broader Pacific Northwest, depends on the same principle the Boundary Waters vote just weakened: that wilderness areas are managed for long-term public benefit, not short-term extraction.
Washington Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell voted against the resolution. But a vote is not a firewall. If the CRA can be used to reverse a 20-year mineral withdrawal in Minnesota, no similar protection in Washington is legally settled.
