by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
Last week, the Senate passed three Congressional Review Act resolutions overturning BLM resource management plans. What would have been called an earth-shattering precedent not so long ago was this time hardly noticed except by those who closely follow Interior and energy issues. The Biden-era resource management plans were designed to lock up millions of acres of public lands from the “multiple uses” required by law.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) was part of a small business package signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. It provided a tool Congress sometimes uses to overturn federal regulatory agency actions. It requires agencies to report any new rules to Congress and provides special procedures under which Congress can disapprove them. It applies to “major rules, non-major rules, and interim final rules” very broadly, even including agency actions that have not been subject to traditional notice-and-comment rulemaking, such as “guidance documents and policy memoranda.”
When agencies report to Congress that they have adopted any new rules, Congress has 60 days to disapprove the rules before they go into effect. To disapprove a rule, the House and the Senate must pass a joint resolution, which the president must sign like any other law.
In passing the latest resolutions, the Senate used the CRA in an entirely new way. It had never been used to rescind land management plans, which some might have claimed are not “rules” under the CRA’s definition. Yet there was no major fight about it on the Senate floor, unlike the battle earlier this year when the CRA was used against California’s ban on gas-powered cars to cancel EPA “waivers” that had allowed California to ban gas-powered cars. Normally, states cannot impose environmental regulations that are stricter than federal standards, except if EPA grants “waivers,” which the Biden EPA had done for California.
