December, 16 2020, 11:00pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
John Horning, WildEarth Guardians, 505-795-5083, jhorning@wildearthguardians.org
WildEarth Guardians Lauds Biden's Pick of Haaland for Interior Secretary
First Native Cabinet Secretary will make climate and environmental justice a centerpiece of Interior Department
WASHINGTON
According to the Washington Post, President-elect Joe Biden has picked Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico to join his Cabinet as Secretary of the Interior.
Representative Haaland, a 35th generation New Mexican and an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna, would be the first Indigenous person to run any Cabinet-level department in the history of the United States.
In response, John Horning, executive director of New Mexico-based WildEarth Guardians, issued the following statement:
"WildEarth Guardians enthusiastically supports the historic nomination of Representative Deb Haaland to serve as Interior Secretary. Representative Haaland has been a steadfast champion of bold climate action, environmental justice, and protection of public lands and imperiled wildlife.
Representative Haaland's leadership defending the Greater Chaco region from the Trump administration's 'Energy Dominance' agenda demonstrates that she's the perfect person to fulfill President-elect Biden's promise to end new oil and gas leasing on federal public lands and waters.
In Congress, Representative Haaland has been at the forefront of issues central to what the Department of Interior must address to confront the climate and nature crises: Stop the plundering of public lands, protect endangered species, implement policies that nurture an ethic of wildlife co-existence, protect 30% of all lands by 2030, and expand and deepen protection of national parks, monuments, and cultural sites.
As an Indigenous woman, Representative Haaland deeply understands the intersectionality of conservation and racial, climate, and social justice. Given the Department of Interior's trustee obligations to Indigenous Peoples and Tribal Nations, nominating Representative Haaland is a vital step towards reforming the agencies within the Department of the Interior to meet those obligations.
We need bold vision and compassionate leadership in times of crisis and we're confident that Representative Haaland will meet the challenges that a new Interior Secretary will face. We look forward to working with Secretary Haaland to help usher in a new era at the Department of the Interior.
WildEarth Guardians protects and restores the wildlife, wild places, wild rivers, and health of the American West. Driven by passion, we've tackled some of the West's most difficult and pressing conservation challenges over the past three decades. We've celebrated small victories (banning leghold trapping in the state of Colorado), monumental triumphs (ending logging on more than 21 million acres in the Southwest), and everything in-between.
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While applauding the U.S. House of Representatives' bipartisan passage of a bill to ensure that "law enforcement and intelligence agencies can't do an end-run around the Constitution by buying information from data brokers" on Wednesday, privacy advocates highlighted that Congress is trying to extend and expand a long-abused government spying program.
The House voted 219-199 for Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act (FANFSA), which won support from 96 Democrats and 123 Republicans, including the lead sponsor, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio). Named for the constitutional amendment that protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, H.R. 4639 would close what campaigners call the data broker loophole.
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Wednesday's vote followed the House sending the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act to the Senate. H.R. 7888 would reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows for warrantless spying on noncitizens abroad but also sweeps up Americans' data.
The House notably included an amendment forcing a wide range of individuals and businesses to cooperate with government spying operations but rejected an amendment that would have added a warrant requirement to the bill, which the Senate could vote on as soon as Thursday.
Noting those decisions on the FISA reauthorization legislation, Ruddock stressed that "today's vote is a victory but follows a recent loss and ongoing threat as that Section 702 bill moves to the Senate this week too."
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Jeramie Scott, senior counsel and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Project on Surveillance Oversight, also praised the House's FANFSA passage on Wednesday.
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Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at ACLU, similarly said Wednesday that "the bipartisan passage of this bill is a flashing warning sign to the government that if it wants our data, it must get a warrant."
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While claiming that President Joe Biden backs "Palestinian aspirations for statehood," one of the cables asserts that "it remains the U.S. view that the most expeditious path toward a political horizon for the Palestinian people is in the context of a normalization agreement between Israel and its neighbors."
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As The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein and Daniel Boguslaw noted:
Since 2011, the U.N. Security Council has rejected the Palestinian Authority's request for full member status. On April 2, the Palestinian Observer Mission to the U.N. requested that the council once again take up consideration of its membership application. According to the first State Department cable, U.N. meetings since the beginning of April suggest that Algeria, China, Guyana, Mozambique, Russia, Slovenia, Sierra Leone, and Malta support granting Palestine full membership to the U.N. It also says that France, Japan, and Korea are undecided, while the United Kingdom will likely abstain from a vote.
Along with the United States, China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom are permanent members of the UNSC, so they also have veto power.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has also claimed to support a so-called "two-state solution"—has alternately boasted about thwarting Palestinian statehood.
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