House Republicans retreated to talking points and missed a key opportunity to highlight Biden’s return of ‘sue and settle.’ //

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle shared frustration over the nation’s archaic permitting process Wednesday at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on energy and minerals. //

Last summer, the Biden administration reintroduced “sue and settle” practices brought to a halt under President Donald Trump. The practice refers to when lefty environmental groups allied with the government position on an issue present a legal challenge to a project and, in turn, voluntarily settle. The preferred policy outcome is implemented as a result under the cover of the courts, and liberal interest groups pocket a lucrative profit from the taxpayer.

“It takes 16 years now to permit a new mine,” Rick Whitbeck, the Alaska director for Power the Future, told The Federalist. “Part of the process — at least from the environmental activists — is to ‘litigate and make them wait,’ where they continuously file legal motions, find a friendly judge, and delay the permitting process.” //

In July, President Joe Biden’s Department of the Interior took an axe to her predecessor’s order and scrubbed the agency website placing settlements and consent decrees in public view.

The move reintroduces a signature feature of the kind of Beltway swamp activity that ushered President Donald Trump into the White House six years ago. Lawmakers, however, remained silent on the reintroduction of “sue and settle” cases despite industry leaders complaining again and again that environmental litigation is crippling the country Wednesday. //

When you look at litigation, it’s really easy to find some analysis in a 5,000 page document that could have been done better. And it’s supposed to be done on the best available information, not waiting years and years for more information to come in or requiring the project proponent to go off and do a science project and come back 10 years later. So I would say constraining it to what the focus is on the impacts on the ground of that project. Not hypothetical impacts 10 years into the future.

Republicans had a prime opportunity to highlight the administrative return of sue and settle. Instead, the hearing was a four-hour regurgitation of talking points on how Biden was bad to shut down the Keystone Pipeline.