House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s order blocking copper-nickel mining near the Boundary Waters will empower foreign adversaries like China and kill union jobs across the state’s northern Iron Range.
Speaking with host Matthew Boyle on Breitbart News Saturday, Emmer said the outgoing governor was acting out of spite as he prepares to leave office, and argued the decision drives mineral production toward countries with far weaker environmental records.
“But this lame duck loser… named Tim Walz, he’s not only, I think, complicit in the fraud in this state, he’s completely incompetent and now he’s being spiteful,” Emmer said. “Literally as he’s leaving office in the next couple of months, what he’s doing is he’s trying to exercise executive authority from the governor’s office to end mining in Minnesota.”
“He is going to empower our adversaries like the Communist Party of China,” Emmer said. “We have the most stringent environmental laws on the face of the planet. If you’re going to end mining in the United States of America, you’re going to send it to places like China and Russia where they don’t care.”
Emmer rejected the environmental case for the order, saying everyone wants clean water and clean air and that the environment was not the real issue.
“We’re all environmentalists… We all appreciate clean water, clean air. We want to leave the planet in as good or better condition than we found it,” Emmer said. “But that’s not the issue, even though that’s what he wants to claim the issue is.”
The Republican said the deposit ranks among the largest precious-metals finds in the world, holding copper, nickel, and palladium used in cell phones and automobiles. He said the order kills hundreds if not thousands of good-paying union jobs and cuts off revenue that flows to Minnesota’s public school trust lands.
Emmer also faulted Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, arguing Democrats who invoke the working class are governing only for “one downtown Minneapolis.”
Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN), who led the congressional repeal of the federal mining ban, called the order “an outright war on Northern Minnesota and our way of life.”
Walz signed Executive Order 26-10 on Tuesday, directing state agencies to halt permitting and leasing for nonferrous mining in the Rainy River Headwaters Watershed and to review 38 existing leases, including one held by Twin Metals, a subsidiary of Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta.
The order followed Congress’s April vote to repeal a 20-year federal ban on mining near the wilderness, a resolution Stauber sponsored that cleared the Senate 50-49 before President Donald Trump signed it. Walz dropped his 2026 reelection bid amid a sprawling social services fraud scandal.
“As far as my administration is concerned, the fight for the future of the Boundary Waters is over,” Walz said.
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