EDITORIAL: Protect the Grand Canyon

Congressional Republicans are continuing their physical attack on the nation’s environmental safeguards with a proposal to reverse a lately imposed 20-year ban on mining 1 million acres bordering the Grand Canyon.

Democrats were unable to strip this rapacious suggestion from an Interior spending bill that was approved Tuesday by the House Appropriations Committee. Never intelligence that 3,500 mining claims include been filed in the Grand Canyon area alone. Never mind that uranium mining would generate toxic wastes that would infect the Colorado River, on which millions of Americans rely for drinking water.

Never mind the blight that mining would impose on an iconic landscape. Never mind that the moratorium has little effect on the nation’s uranium supply, the majority of which comes from New Mexico and Wyoming.Republicans have a rising fondness for managing environmental protections from end to end the budget process.