The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 1, 2025. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)
Twenty years ago, the Base Realignment and Closure Commission gave Ellsworth Air Force Base a 12% chance of survival.
Washington technocrats had their charts and “authorities.” They didn’t have Box Elder on a map and probably couldn’t find it if they tried.
Then-freshman Sen. John Thune and then-Gov. Mike Rounds refused to accept that distant bureaucrats understood the strategic value of western South Dakota better than the people who live there. They challenged faulty assumptions, rallied the state and made the case that local knowledge matters.
Today, the B-21 Raider is headed to Ellsworth because they did. It was a master class in defending the Senate’s home-state prerogative — the unwritten rule that the senators closest to the ground deserve the greatest deference.
That’s why a seemingly distant fight — a mining dispute in Minnesota — should concern South Dakotans.
The Senate is considering using the Congressional Review Act to overturn a site-specific, 20-year mineral withdrawal that prevents mining near the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The resolution, House Joint Resolution 140, would nullify a local land use decision over the objections of Minnesota’s own senators.
U.S. House makes mining near the Boundary Waters more likely
Whatever you think about mining in Minnesota, the procedural move should give us pause.
The Boundary Waters aren’t an abstraction to South Dakotans. Many thousands of us, including me, have canoed those cold, clear lakes in search of walleye and northerns, listening to loons echo across the granite shorelines as dusk settles in.
You don’t spend a week paddling and portaging through that kind of country without feeling something deeper than recreation. Call it solitude. Call it perspective. Some call it spirituality. Whatever the word, it’s real.
South Dakotans know what is at stake when mining is near water.
We’re still paying for the toxic legacy of the Gilt Edge Mine in the Black Hills, where acid mine drainage contaminated nearby streams, ruined fishing and left taxpayers funding perpetual water treatment.
Sulfide-ore mining and water are a volatile mix. Pristine granite watersheds, like the Boundary Waters, have zero natural ability to neutralize acid. Like Gilt Edge, it is an irreversible ecological disaster waiting to happen.
But the larger danger isn’t environmental. It’s institutional.
The Congressional Review Act was designed to repeal sweeping federal regulations. It was not built to micromanage individual land decisions. If the Senate stretches it now to overrule a site-specific action — and does so against the wishes of the home-state delegation — it shatters a tradition that protects small states like ours.
For years, Sens. Thune and Rounds have worked to update the management plan for the Black Hills National Forest — balancing timber harvests, grazing, recreation and wildfire mitigation. It’s a collaborative process. It’s not perfect. But it is being shaped by South Dakotans for South Dakota.
Now imagine a different Washington in 2029 — a Democratic White House and Congress, urged on by out-of-state advocacy groups that dislike our forest plan. If today’s Senate sets the precedent that site-specific land decisions are fair game under the Congressional Review Act — even over home-state objections — a future majority could use that same tool to overturn South Dakota’s forest plan with 51 votes.
No filibuster. No 60-vote threshold. No deference to the people who live here.
Worse, the Congressional Review Act’s “substantially the same” clause would bar the Forest Service from issuing a similar plan without a new act of Congress. One vote could freeze management of the Black Hills in legal amber. That’s not conservation. That’s paralysis.
When Thune and Rounds saved Ellsworth in 2005, they sent a message: Washington should listen to the people who know the terrain. That principle shouldn’t depend on which party benefits this week.
If the Senate abandons home-state courtesy now, it hands future majorities a ready-made weapon to use against us later.
Sen. Thune, as majority leader, has the authority to decide what comes to the floor. He should protect the home state prerogative. He should keep the Congressional Review Act in its proper lane, and make sure the next time Washington thinks it knows better than South Dakota, our senators still have the standing to say otherwise.
