When the Bureau of Land Management announced that they were going to allow uranium mining along with oil and gas drilling around the Grand Canyon, Congress members who cared about the canyon, or national parks, or the environment, or common sense were more than a little miffed, and fortunately for them (and us) Congress had a means to act that didn't involve issuing a subpoena.
The 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act gives the House Natural Resources Committee and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee the power to order the Secretary of the Interior to put a temporary hold on allowing mineral extraction on public land. So they did. The House Natural Resources Committee voted 20-2 to block block mining in the area the BLM had proposed to open.
Then the Bush Interior Department followed the law and... no, no, wait. Sorry, but we don't live in that universe. First the Interior Department simply refused to issue the order on the grounds that not enough Republicans had been involved in the vote. Seriously.
Still, why stop at only disobeying the law when you can just claim the arbitrary ability to rewrite the rules so you don't have to listen to Congress?
The Bush administration is trying to make it tougher for Congress to block mining and oil and gas drilling on public lands.
The Bureau of Land Management, which manages 258 million acres of federal property, stripped from its regulations Thursday a provision that gives two Congressional committees the power to compel the Interior Secretary to temporarily place public land off limits to mining and oil and gas development.
Here the BLM officially puts its fingers in its ears, showing that while Congress can write a law, enforcing it is another issue. And so the Bush administration proves once again that the Founding Fathers created two more branches of government than we needed.