The stage was set last Wednesday for Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) to achieve a long-awaited legislative victory.

The state’s lone congressional Republican, for whom land use policy is his chief interest, has not had a land-related bill pass the House since 2018. With House Republican leadership focusing on natural resources this week, Amodei’s bill — which would permit mining companies to dump waste on neighboring lands in response to a restrictive judicial decision — was teed up for a vote. With a Democratic co-sponsor and the support of the Republican caucus, it seemed likely to pass.

But the vote never happened. Instead, six far-right House Republicans voted with all Democrats for a motion to recommit — a legislative procedure deployed by the minority party to send a bill back to committee for further consideration and amendment. Wednesday’s vote was the first time since 2020 that a motion to recommit passed, and the first instance since 2004 in which it passed under a GOP House majority.

The rebels’ vote was not a protest against the content of the bill — one dissenter, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) voted for it in committee — but rather the latest episode in an ongoing floor war between House Republican leadership and their detractors, who have thrown the chamber into chaos on numerous occasions by tanking rules and bills to register their displeasure with the speaker’s decision making.

Amodei — and the mining companies and environmental groups that support and oppose the bill, respectively — ended up in the crossfire.

In an interview, Amodei said both he and leadership were caught off guard on the floor Wednesday, but that they plan to bring the bill back up for a vote next week. 

“I don’t think my bill had anything to do with it,” he said. “It was like, ‘Hey, this is our first chance to poke somebody in the eye on something entirely unrelated.’”

The details of the bill 

The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act (MRCA), a bill sponsored by Amodei in the House and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) in the Senate, would be a boon to mining companies, allowing them to use public lands adjacent to the mine, regardless of whether a mineral deposit has been discovered there. Amodei and Cortez Masto crafted the legislation in response to the 2022 Rosemont decision, when a federal appeals court in Arizona ruled that a mining claim did not include the right to dump waste on public land without mineral discovery. The Biden administration, however, is opposed to the bill.

The decision represented a legal reinterpretation of the 1872 Mining Law that still governs mineral claims — and was reinforced in a pair of Nevada cases, including one pertaining to the controversial Thacker Pass lithium mine.

When mining companies seek to establish a claim, they have to meet several criteria to receive the permit from the relevant federal agency governing the land. They can test if there are indeed valuable minerals present through a validity exam. 

However, such a test is both complicated and not required, so agencies often decline to conduct them and permit the mining regardless. That arrangement led to a system where, for decades, mining companies dumped waste on neighboring public lands, which have not undergone review.

The Rosemont decision upended that permissive status quo, declaring that the U.S. Forest Service was wrong to allow the copper mining company to use the acreage within their claim that was unpatented — or was not proven to be directly above the mineral.

The Nevada representatives’ bill seeks to declare that the prior interpretation of the mining law was the correct one, codifying the previous standard for the mining industry — a major employer and political power player in the Silver State, as the nickname suggests. It would allow mining companies to conduct any associated operations, including waste disposal, construction and processing, on public lands where the mineral is not present.

The Nevada Mining Association (NVMA) said the bill would stabilize the industry’s environment at a time of great demand for lithium permitting.

“It will remove unnecessary risk and uncertainty that currently exists for mining operations that are looking to expand or new mining operations,” NVMA president Amanda Hilton said in an interview.

Environmental groups, however, have blasted the bill as a giveaway to the mining industry. They praised the Rosemont decision as a victory in the quest to reform mining law, an endeavor that’s proven legislatively impossible since 1872, in no small part thanks to former Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), who used his power as Senate majority leader to kill attempts to change the way the industry is regulated, including proposals to impose federal royalty fees, which mining companies currently do not have to pay.

Natural resources-focused House Democrats have called the standard in which mining activities can only take place on claimed lands with minerals as the “one guardrail against a veritable mining claim free-for-all.”

Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said while mining companies may only be interested in lands with minerals, the existence of a mining claim makes the land subject to the 1872 Mining Law and supersedes other policies promoting multiple uses. That means the land in a mining claim can no longer be used for anything from recreation to renewable energy development to being leased to a school district. 

But Amodei argues that environmental protection laws are still in place governing federal land use, and are a built-in protection against bad actors. Opponents of the bill are just opponents of extractive mining in any form, he said.

“The essence of the bill is to basically overrule the Rosemont decision,” Amodei said. “We're not plowing new ground.” 

But Donnelly said that the bill goes beyond just returning to the pre-Rosemont definition, which simply did not mandate a validity exam. He said it sets a legal standard by which mining companies do not need to meet the mineral discovery criteria at all.

He added that he’s also worried about the bill allowing any ancillary mining activities on claimed land, including infrastructure like pipelines or transmission lines that are typically regulated under a more rigorous standard.

“Instead of reforming 1872, it's broadening 1872’s reach,” Donnelly said in an interview. “It's doubling down on the problems of 1872.”

The clean energy conundrum

Hanging over the debate of how to pursue mining reform — and the ground between Cortez Masto and the Biden administration on the issue — is a mutual interest in mining lithium. The silver metal is used in electric batteries and is central to Democrats’ goals of building a lithium-centric supply chain in the U.S.

The legislation has bred strange bedfellows — Amodei and Cortez Masto are united in support of it, while the Biden administration issued a statement of administration policy saying it “strongly opposes” the bill.

The administration acknowledged in the statement an increasing need to source critical minerals in the U.S. to meet clean energy targets. However, it said the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act is too deferential to private actors.

The bill “could allow mining companies, or any individual, to manipulate the mining claims process to, for example, slow a solar, wind, or transmission project, or recreation area simply by filing a claim, and paying a nominal fee, thereby exercising their new right to impede other development activities,” the administration wrote.

Cortez Masto said the Biden administration is operating under misinformation — and that the bill would better enable the mining of critical minerals for clean energy rather than restrict it.

Like Reid, Cortez Masto has simultaneously sought to protect her home state’s mining industry against the objections of fellow Democrats while championing environmental causes. 

“Mining is important,” Cortez Masto said in an interview. “Bringing back not only mining, [which] is necessary for that clean energy future, those jobs, the processing…it just needs to be done.”

Donnelly said that in trying to out-clean energy one another, both Cortez Masto and the Biden administration are missing the point — that the MRCA applies to all hardrock mining, not just lithium, and its potential negative effects go beyond just blocking land that could be otherwise used for renewable energy installations.

Amodei said that the Biden administration is trying to have it both ways by painting his legislation as destructive to the environment while simultaneously offering billions of dollars in loans to Nevada companies to mine lithium.

“It's not some wild-eyed MAGA idea that we need those sorts of things,” Amodei said about lithium mining. “It is my opinion that you can be responsible with resources and still extract the minerals that you need."