U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet is very incorrectly using the Gold King Mine disaster as an excuse to push a mining bill through Congress.
The goal is to avert such a disaster, the rhetoric goes, a disaster caused an EPA contractor.
Extra emphasis on the word contractor.
As everyone including Democrats and even the EPA know, the disaster was caused by the EPA itself. The mine did not cause it.
The legislation would prevent further disasters by requiring gold, silver, copper and other hard rock mining operations to pay the government royalties.
That’s how environmental disasters caused by the EPA are prevented, we are led to believe by Bennet and the other bill sponsors that including Democratic Sens. Tom Udall of New Mexico and Ed Markey of Massachusetts.
The bill “helps ensure that taxpayers aren’t on the hook for cleaning up abandoned mines, and seeks to prevent another toxic spill like the Gold King Mine disaster of 2015,” the senators said.
It sounds like the Democrats spent more time revising history than they did crafting the actual law.