Biden makes the right choice for Interior

In a historic decision, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has chosen Deb Haaland, a congressional representative from New Mexico and a Native American, to lead the Interior Department, an agency that for much of the nation’s history played a central role in the dislocation and abuse of Indigenous communities from coast to coast.

Mr. Biden’s transition team announced the decision Thursday. If confirmed by the Senate, Ms. Haaland would be the first Native American to lead a cabinet-level agency. She would oversee a sprawling department responsible for some 500 million acres of public lands, including national parks, oil and gas drilling sites and endangered species habitat.

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Ms. Haaland was not seen as Mr. Biden’s initial choice to run the agency. In the days after the presidential election, he was believed to have been leaning toward Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico and a longtime friend who has spent his career pushing to conserve wilderness, according to people close to the transition team.

  NYT

Udall would have been good, too.

On Thursday, Mr. Udall offered his full-throated support for the choice. “President-Elect Biden has chosen an outstanding leader,” he said. “She will undo the damage of the Trump administration, restore the department’s work force and expertise, uphold our obligations to Native communities, and take the bold action needed to tackle the accelerating climate and nature crises.”

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A child of military veterans, she attended 13 public schools before graduating from high school, then started a salsa company and worked as a cake decorator before putting herself through college and law school using both food stamps and student loans.

Over the past two years, Ms. Haaland has served on the House Natural Resources Committee, which oversees the Interior Department. Under the Trump administration, the current and former Interior secretaries, David Bernhardt and Ryan Zinke, have used the agency to make it easier to mine and drill on public lands, while also weakening protections on endangered species. Just this week, the Interior Department finalized two rules that limit protections to animals and plants under the Endangered Species Act.

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“The sad fact is that we have a president who is intent on selling off our public lands to his friends for fracking and drilling,” she said in a speech earlier this year. She noted that under Mr. Bernhardt and Mr. Zinke, the Interior Department slashed the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante, national monuments in Utah that are adjacent to Navajo nation territories and a Hopi reservation, opening up the land to mining and drilling.

In her new role, Ms. Haaland could be tasked with restoring protections to the monuments. That land, she said, “is now open to leases and desecration by extractive industries, which will exacerbate climate change and destroy countless sacred sites and erase our history.”

She would also be responsible for executing one of Mr. Biden’s most controversial proposals: his pledge to ban all new hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on public lands. Already, fossil fuel groups are pushing back, urging Senators to block her confirmation on Capitol Hill.

This could be a fight. If they don't confirm her, they'll be okay with Udall. But they may get enough pressure to confirm her after smearing her in her hearing.

If she is confirmed by the Senate, her departure from the House could briefly make it more difficult for Mr. Biden to advance his legislative agenda, since it would narrow the Democrats’ already razor-thin majority until a special election could be held in her Democratic-majority district.

For that reason, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was said to have been urging Mr. Biden not to select Ms. Haaland.

Apparently, Nancy is losing some of her clout. Time for her to be sidelined anyway.

But we definitely do not need a Republican House.