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Make Your Calls! The Senate Votes on BAAJA on Monday!

November 13, 2026•Tommy Hough

On Nov. 3rd Americans made it clear we want a return to governmental norms, and that includes the preservation of long-standing, effective environmental laws. But less than one week after the largest electoral shift since the post-Watergate 1974 midterms, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), a bill built on unchecked data center expansion on public lands that codifies Trump’s environmental rollbacks, was passed by a Senate that’s ignoring the clear demands of the American people.

For years developers and land speculators have been trying to sneak “permitting reform” past the Democratic Party as a means of gutting key environmental laws. Now, with the benign-sounding Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), they might just get their way. If passed into law, BAAJA will do unrepairable damage to the environment, native cultural sites, and public lands by weakening protections and allowing “forever permits” for data centers, mines, power plants, and more.

Even worse, the bill guts four key, long-standing environmental laws: the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970, the Clean Water Act (CWA) of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973. Please take action now and tell your senators to vote NO on Senate bill S. 5653 or any policy that threatens these or other environmental laws! The Capitol switchboard number is (202) 224-3121.

In particular, keep pressure on these U.S. senators this weekend as the Senate attempts to bulldoze BAAJA to approval. Votes are getting locked in now and the amendment process is a non-starter as outgoing Senate Majority Leader John Thune is actively blocking any Democratic amendments. Share this call to action with your family, friends, colleagues, and networks in your state and other states, and keep up the pressure on the U.S. senators listed here. Call them and their offices and DO NOT LET UP:

Call and call them again, and have your friends and family in other states do the same. Send follow-up emails too (when time permits, hand-written letters to legislators are the best). Divvy up a calling list with your friends and fellow advocates and rotate through all the offices. Just keep the pressure on: VOTE NO ON BAAJA, Senate bill S. 5653. We are expecting a vote THIS Monday the 16th.

Repeat again and repeat again, until one day we can again wander quiet trails and summit mountaintops, enjoy waterfalls and wildlife, and explore ancient forests, meadows, and grasslands, free of concern for unthreatened, unmolested federal public lands.

Trump’s Destruction of Public Lands: Bulldozing National Parks

The lid of normalcy has been so thoroughly yanked off the American Pandora’s box in the Trump era that basic, neighborly American decency, relatability, and empathy may take decades to recover. I’ll be happy to be proved wrong, but too often in the Trump era my worst fears have been proven entirely correct. That certainly goes for the Trump regime’s pathological attacks on our nation’s public lands and conservation heritage — one of the most severe and violent breaks from American normalcy and settled law since Trump was sworn back into office in January 2025. They just can’t come to terms with land preserved and left undeveloped in its natural state.

Coming on the heels of the unpretentious state funeral and burial of Jimmy Carter, the nation’s 39th president and arguably the most decent person to have occupied the White House (as well as one of the architects of the landmark Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980 that set aside 104 million acres of federal public land for conservation), a friend remarked that it appeared, with Trump’s inauguration coming days after Carter’s interment, that Americans were burying Jimmy Carter and democracy right along with it as Trump returned to darken our door a second time.

And with the corrupt and degenerate right-wing Supreme Court having cleared the way for bulldozers to return to Big Bend National Park to continue their destruction of Big Bend’s flora, fauna, and canyon habitat — managed for conservation under Park Service guidelines since 1944 — for, of all things, the goddamn border wall in a gorge that is already a formidable natural redoubt that inherently prevents any kind of unregulated movement, the malevolent attacks on environmental and conservation norms that would’ve been unthinkable just a few years ago are now just part of the macabre wreckage that is Trump’s tacky, gold-plated, flaccid participation trophy vision of Mar-a-Lago America.

The Supreme Court’s baffling 8 to 1 decision (Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown was the lone holdout for sanity) has annihilated what was once the nation’s highest, near-gold standard level of preservation, as well as a significant source of national pride and economic return as America’s Best Idea. All this in the service of a political stunt and imaginary crisis made real by delusional MAGA “policymakers” that has now rendered all National Parks and protected sites vulnerable to corporate and speculative encroachment — just as Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir warned us over a century ago — in complete defiance of the reason these areas were set aside for protection in the first place as parks and monuments by legions of Americans over the course of decades.

It makes the 1964 Wilderness Act, passed at the very height of American power and the nation’s post-World War II economic expansion, all the more remarkable given the Act’s humility before nature in which the white men who controlled all levers of government and industry at that time still managed to pause long enough to place boundaries on their own expansion. Indeed, the Wilderness Act remains one of LBJ’s great legislative miracles of 1964, and a level of American humility that has never quite been repeated or surpassed.

Of course, in the fetid year of 2026 in which America has tolerated the murder of its own neighbors in the streets by masked, testosterone-addled dipshit paramilitaries and a level of unabashed racism by Republican elected officials and candidates unthinkable until Trump provided them with a nauseating “permission structure” to be their worst selves, the idea of preservation and calming the fuck down on development has become an anachronism. Areas of public land preserved for conservation are now broadly being treated by the enabled energy industry, Silicon Valley tech bros, water-hungry municipalities, and land speculator-beholden politicians as placeholders for data centers and power lines while their highest uses as wilderness and habitat is jettisoned by Republicans, with plenty of help from eager-to-please Democrats too.

From the time of Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to the codification of the National Park Service under Woodrow Wilson in 1916, National Parks were meant to last forever. Today, in Trump’s diseased hands, National Parks and Monuments are as much proof-of-concept political showpieces for irrational policy as anything else. If we continue on this course, it won’t be long before Guy Smiley megachurch carnival barkers and YouTube hustlers will be selling Idiocracy-style amusement park rides over denuded rivers, shattered forests, rotting wildlife carcasses, and freeways coursing through canyons and across the ridges of our nation’s most special, revered places as data centers echo their nightmarish Metal Machine Music industrial pollution sirens day and night, nonstop, throughout the land.

Don’t Waste This Mandate

Yes, Democrats won an epochal victory on Nov. 3rd. The extent of that victory, netting congressional wins not seen since the post-Watergate wipeouts of Republicans in the 1974 and 1976 elections shouldn’t be minimized, though Democrats’ commitment to the stewardship of our National Parks, National Monuments, and Wilderness areas remains suspect as the party was more akin to a “make it stop” anti-MAGA lifeboat rather than a policy incubator, far more beholden to mega-donors and corporate interests in our post-Citizens United world. Only Donald J. Trump and his soiled Depends could be so calamitous a president that Texas, Kansas, Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, and a few other states I’m sure I forgot went blue in such massive, dramatic, satisfying fashion.

Days before the election I said it was imperative that, to avoid Trump again calling America’s election process “rigged,” even as Republicans control all levels of government, the election results needed to be so big so as to be heard around the world. They were. Mission accomplished. In fact, I’m pretty sure the results were heard in space. Whether or not Democrats resign themselves to the limp, wet noodle leadership of Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, both so utterly unable and unwilling to meet the moment remains to be seen, but Jeffries’ secret meeting with the repellent Jared Kushner is, on its own merits, utterly disqualifying.

We have a great crop of young legislators arriving in D.C. from a variety of regions and backgrounds, and that’s good for democracy, the nation, and everyone. Unfortunately, the new crop won’t take power until Jan. 3rd., and as we’ve seen with the calamitous Senate vote on Monday to advance the environmentally-destructive and Orwellian-named “Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act,” or BAAJA, way too many senators in both parties are infected with the disease of Big Oil, Big Energy, fossil fuels, land speculation, and data center money, and those interests can’t cheer for BAAJA loudly enough. Nor can they push their benefactors harder to vote for it.

As thousands of us said upon the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, the ruling was the death knell of conservation and the environment in the U.S., as even well-meaning “blue” legislators had to shift their approach to find funding for increasingly expensive campaigns in which money was permitted to behave and be used as free speech. And the oligarchal money holders, of course, are able to play both sides and change their pronouns as necessary to net the same results.

As environmentalists, we measure success by passing effective environmental laws, which we expect to be duly enforced by the executive branch by way of the Interior, Agriculture, and Justice departments and, generally, acceded to as legal by the courts. Trump and the Republicans broke that model with their embrace of Citizens United. It didn’t start with Trump, but Republicans rapidly ran with the 2010 ruling to great effect, clearing the way for Trump’s ascendancy whether they knew it or not with their follow-up congressional successes in the 2014 midterm elections, when the impact of Citizens Untied first began to be felt in national races.

While the Citizens United decision also fuel-injected and empowered labor unions on the Democratic side, the ruling has left environmentalists, once a key constituency of Democrats (and until the late 1980s a not-unheard of component of the GOP), as an afterthought. After all, as environmentalists, our currency is clean air, clean water, public lands preserved for conservation, biodiversity, and species protection — not cold, hard cash. And since 2010, environmentalists have fewer and fewer champions in Congress unless they are genuine environmentalists themselves committed to preservation. Representative Jared Huffman of California’s 2nd congressional district is one of the few broadly consistent environmentalists at work in Congress.

Unfortunately, like a seed tree sadly left behind in a clearcut after all its neighbors have been scythed away to become wood chips and phone poles, Huffman is one of barely even a few environmentalists that used to populate the golden era of Congress, like Frank Church, Scoop Jackson, Gaylord Nelson, Bob Packwood, Morris Udall, John Saylor, and others. Even John McCain drew a few pro-conservation lessons from his political mentor Barry Goldwater.

In the Senate, both Oregon’s Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley have generally been good on the environment, though Wyden’s commitment to opposing HR 655 and the Mt. Hood National Forest land swap could be better detailed and more full-throated, and financing for Merkley’s recent re-election was heavily dependent on the same tech outlets now pushing BAAJA and data center construction of federal public lands. Nevertheless, both Wyden and Merkley voted to oppose BAAJA, and should be thanked for doing so. Not so much with Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, once considered the Senate’s key public lands advocate and protector, now clearly compromised after sitting next to repellent Utah Senator Mike Lee in Senate Energy and Natural Resource committee hearings the last several years. With his judgement clearly clouded, Heinrich was one of the Democratic sponsors of the disgraceful BAAJA bill with Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse.

The Legacy We Stand to Lose

There’s no doubt the push for “permitting reform” and codifying the Trump regime’s environmental rollbacks of effective, longstanding, popular policy has made major inroads with the few reliably, even passively environmentally-minded Democrats remaining on the Hill, several of whom, like Heinrich, are now making excuses for BAAJA’s destructive gutting of the 1966 National Preservation Act (NHPA), 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA), and the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA). I’d venture to say most senators have only a vague idea of what the concept of “permitting reform” actually means to the YIMBY class, and how the bill will enable the siting of data centers on federal public land with little, if any, public input.

Additional concerns over the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act include:

  • Section 1102 — If made law, this would exclude the vast majority of fossil fuel gas pipeline expansion and upgrade projects from NEPA environmental review. In other words, the public could no longer comment on any of these projects, nor would federal agencies be obliged to hear and consider concerns.
  • Section 1106 — This would silence the public by codifying, if not expanding, the Trump administration’s executive-imposed limits on public participation. The public would be entirely excluded from Environmental Assessment (EA) review processes. With the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process, the public retains the opportunity to comment on proposed action at the scoping stage, albeit before project details are known, but would be denied the ability to review and provide comment on a draft EIS document, a critical oversight portion of the planning process.
  • Section 1110 — This section would deprive the public of the ability to seek justice in federal court. Amazingly, BAAJA advocates seek to deprive federal courts of the power to vacate failing permits, or take a hard look at the environmental impacts of a project free from political or economic influence, consider reasonable alternatives, or otherwise violate NEPA or the NHPA. The BAAJA bill also deprives federal courts of their power to fashion a remedy to prevent irreparable harm, including injunctions for violations of NEPA and the NHPA.
  • Section 1202 — This would hollow out state and Tribal CWA authority to certify federal licenses and permits to protect natural resources.
  • Section 2301 — This item would radically weaken Section 106 of the NHPA Tribal consultation process, which would render it “permissive,” to coin a legal term, and confined to artificial deadlines, thereby weakening the requirement that the federal government notify Tribal nations before decisions are made. Section 2301 would also narrow the scope of what the NHPA protects, contrary to how Tribes understand and protect sacred sites.

So even after Americans made it crystal clear to candidates and elected officials on Nov. 3rd they don’t want data centers, and that the transgressions of the last two years cannot continue, a majority of the Senate voted on Nov. 9th to begin the process of approving BAAJA anyway during the lame duck congressional session, when plenty of outgoing legislators with little input from leadership have nothing to lose by voting for shitty policies that will reward them down the line with lobbying and other lucrative, influence-peddling jobs.

I can’t say if BAAJA would have a better or worse chance of passing the new Congress arriving Jan. 3rd, but the lame duck session will extend to at least Christmas given the need for a continuing budget resolution. BAAJA’s backers know this, and that the lame duck is their best chance to get this legislation over the line and onto Trump’s desk. That they’ve used Heinrich as their Democratic vessel to normalize this policy shouldn’t be forgotten, and along with BAAJA all other kinds of mischief are also in mix this holiday season, including the reprehensible Save Our Sequoias Act and Fix Our Forests Act, still lingering in the shadows.

Both bills are the dreck of pro-logging, anti-environmental policies designed to smash environmental norms, and are both based on the discredited premise that increased logging of old-growth forest in wilderness lessens there likelihood of wildlife, even though forest fires seldom pose threats to populated areas, while urban wildfires — a different phenomenon entirely — are a genuine danger to communities in wildland-urban interface zones and would benefit from fire-hardening funding, while the Save Our Sequoias and Fix Our Forests acts are simply destructive giveaways to Big Timber. And with Trump’s tariffs on China and other nations still in place, logged old-growth will remain in sawmill lots rotting away while waiting for overseas customers, instead of growing further and maintaining life, balance, wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration, and climate resilience in our western forests.

Until we have a president, or even a change in administration to someone other than J.D. Vance, who even broadly respects long-standing and successful conservation laws as being a good thing for the nation, we’ll need to keep Congress on speed dial as individual bills that seek to desecrate our federal public lands and smash environmental norms continue under this radicalized, nihilistic GOP regime that more and more appears as though it simply loathes all life on earth. The new Congress will have its hands full (hopefully) questioning Interior leadership on its just-announced plans to dismantle the National Park Service and privatize our public lands into oligarchal hunting preserves, vacation getaways, and golf resort nightmares where the public isn’t allowed. Sadly, other than a handful of high-profile Sierra club endorsements, we know little about these new Democrats’ conservation stances, in part because legacy media outlets never asked them about it.

Commonwealth Basin (Alpine Lakes Wilderness) and Mount Pisgah Arboretum photos by Tommy Hough, not for reproduction.