[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 159 (Tuesday, September 15, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5591-S5592]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Unanimous Consent Request--S. 2843
Mr. UDALL. Mr. President, as if in legislation session, I ask
unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from
further consideration of S. 2843, the Violence Against Women
Reauthorization Act, and that the Senate proceed to its immediate
consideration; further, that the bill be considered read a third time
and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid
upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, for the reasons that I mentioned earlier
in my comments, I object to this version of VAWA.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. UDALL. Mr. President, thank you for the recognition today.
We rise--a number of Senators who will be speaking today in this
hour--we rise today to demand that the White House immediately remove
William Perry Pendley from exercising the authority of the Director of
the Bureau of Land Management and nominate a qualified person to be
Director, subject to Senate confirmation.
William Perry Pendley embodies the Trump administration's approach to
conservation--they don't believe in it. He embodies the Trump
administration's approach to Tribal sovereignty--they don't respect it.
His continued employment at BLM embodies the Trump administration's
approach to the law and the separation of powers--they will trample all
over it every chance they get.
Mr. Pendley has been exercising the authority of the Director since
July 2019. Let's get one thing straight: This title has no basis in
law. He is serving as Acting BLM Director under temporary appointments
that the Secretary keeps renewing in a cynical ploy to evade the
Constitution, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, and the judgment of the
Senate.
Mr. Pendley's record on conservation is so bad, so antithetical to
the agency he oversees, that the Trump administration knew he wouldn't
survive a Senate confirmation. So, instead, they have concocted this
shell game.
The Director of BLM is subject to Senate confirmation. This
administration did not bother to nominate anyone for 4 years until June
of this year when Mr. Pendley was formally nominated. However, the ink
had barely dried on his nomination papers before the President was
forced to withdraw the nomination.
From the beginning, the conservation outdoor recreation sports men
and women communities have been uniformly opposed to Mr. Pendley's
appointment, but that is not why the President withdrew his nomination.
He withdrew the nomination because Mr. Pendley's extreme anti-public
lands positions made him too toxic for Republican Senators from Western
States facing tough reelections.
If Mr. Pendley can't be confirmed as BLM Director, he should not
remain the de facto leader of the agency. He should be immediately
removed. No more shell games. There are many reasons Mr. Pendley is
unfit to serve, more than I have time to discuss, but let me discuss
three with you now.
First, over the course of his 40-year career, he has established
himself as one of the premier anti-public lands crusaders in the
Nation. He has repeatedly advocated that the Federal Government sell
off public lands, arguing that was the Nation's Founders' intent.
As recently as 2016, he penned an op-ed entitled--and I quote here
from his
[[Page S5592]]
op-ed--``The Federal Government Should Follow the Constitution and Sell
Its Western Lands.'' This is from the man who is now charged with
running the agency that oversees our public lands. It is appalling.
BLM manages 245 million acres on behalf of the American people.
Managing these public lands is the central mission of the job, and he
doesn't think there should be any. It is no wonder he is trouble for
western Republican candidates. Poll after poll of westerners show
overwhelming support for public lands among Republicans, Democrats, and
Independents. Selling off our national heritage to the highest bidder
is extreme and extremely unpopular.
Mr. Pendley has been singularly focused on renting out our public
lands to extraction industries to the exclusion of other purposes, such
as conservation, outdoor recreation, and preservation of cultural and
historic values.
As Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy and Minerals for the
Department of the Interior in the 1980s, Pendley was a tireless
advocate for opening up public lands, from the Outer Continental Shelf
to wilderness areas, to drilling and mining. When he was in charge of
coal leasing in the interior in the 1980s, he helped coal companies get
a sweetheart deal--leasing 1.6 million tons of coal in the Powder River
Basin at bargain basement prices. The General Accounting Office
concluded that Federal taxpayers received about $100 million below fair
market value for that sale, or about $286 million in today's dollars.
Mr. Pendley was removed from his position after that GAO report, and
he hasn't changed one bit over the years. As executive director of the
Mountain States Legal Foundation for 30 years, Pendley fought tooth and
nail for drilling and mining on our public lands. If left unchecked, I
have no doubt Mr. Pendley will continue to turn back the clock on 60
years of our Nation reckoning with the devastating consequences of
recklessly extracting from the Earth.
Second, Mr. Pendley's well-documented racist attitudes make him unfit
for his role. He has disdain for Native Americans--their Tribal
sovereignty and their religious practices. He is very anti-immigrant.
He smears the Black Lives Matter movement. He called Native religious
views: ``pantheism, paganism, and cultural myths.'' He has fought
against protecting their sacred sites on Federal lands.
It is Pendley's BLM that wanted to hold virtual meetings to determine
the future of the greater Chaco Canyon landscape at the same time that
the Navajo Nation was facing one of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the
country. And in that area that has some of the lowest broadband rates
in the Nation--now talk about tone-deaf--as the vice chair of the
Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, I am here to say that Mr. Pendley
has no business managing lands that are home to sacred Native sites. He
has questioned the basis of Tribal sovereignty and even Tribal
recognition. He wrote: ``The day may come sooner than many expect given
that, with ever-declining blood quantum per tribal member, recognized
tribes may soon be little more than associations of financial
convenience.''
Let's call Mr. Pendley's offensive statement what it is: overt
racism. But his disdain for people of color is not limited to Native
Americans. He has called undocumented immigrants ``a cancer.'' He has
claimed immigration will lead to: ``You and I permanently losing the
country we love.'' He has claimed undocumented immigrants create
violent crime, crowded schools, and spread disease. Mr. Pendley's
racism has no place in today's America. He is unqualified to manage
public lands at a time when we all should be working to make them more
accessible to all America.
People of color who have business before the Bureau of Land
Management, as many do every day, have every right to wonder: Is the
deck stacked against them? It shouldn't be that way.
And, finally, a third reason that all of us should demand Mr. Pendley
be removed from his position: He is a climate change denier. The
science of climate change that is happening and that is human-caused is
well established. We are years and years beyond any scientific argument
on these points. Just open your eyes and look at the wildfires that are
raging throughout the West, forcing people to evacuate their homes and
making wide swaths of the West look like an apocalyptic scene out over
a Hollywood movie. Yet Pendley has claimed that climate change is like
unicorns--neither exist.
Pendley's hostility to science comes as no surprise. He is working
for a President who claimed just yesterday, as he made a belated visit
to California, that ``I don't think science knows,'' referring to
climate change. The President is saying: ``I don't think science
knows.''
The President claims he knows, insisting, ``It will start getting
cooler.'' This President tries to undermine any institution that
challenges his world view--whether it is science, the press, our
national intelligence agencies, or the courts.
But while Mr. Pendley and the President deny the reality of climate
change, right now, today, in California and Oregon, BLM and other
public lands are burning. While they put their heads in the sand on
climate change, the families who have lost loved ones in this
unprecedented fire season in that part of the country and the thousands
who have lost homes don't have that luxury. In the view of William
Pendley, the President, and his administration, the West is a place to
be plundered for natural resources and then left to burn. And while
Pendley and the Trump administration don't think the Interior
Department has any role to play combating climate change, in fact, one-
quarter--25 percent--of all U.S. carbon emissions come from fossil
fuels extracted from public lands.
Our public lands are a big part of the climate change problem.
Instead of being a source of pollution, public lands must be an
integral part of the climate solution. William Pendley's vision for
public lands is some terrible caricature that should be consigned to
the history books, where our public lands are to be exploited, not
conserved, where Native people are scorned and people of color are not
seen, and where climate change does not exist.
William Pendley is an extremist, and he was never going to be
confirmed by the U.S. Senate. It is time he is shown the door.
I now turn to my colleagues who are with me on the floor. I am very
proud to introduce my good friend and colleague, New Mexico's junior--
soon-to-be senior Senator--Senator Martin Heinrich. Martin led the
entire Senate Democratic caucus in a letter to the President opposing
Mr. Pendley's nomination as BLM Director, and once the nomination was
withdrawn, he led the caucus urging the Secretary to remove Mr. Pendley
from his Acting position
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.