Pearce’s BLM nomination advances to Senate floor

The U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved Steve Pearce’s nomination as the director of the Bureau of Land Management.

Senators on the committee voted along party lines 11-9 on Wednesday to send Pearce’s nomination to the Senate floor for a full vote. Pearce, a 78-year-old Republican with a long history in New Mexico politics, faces a friendly audience on the Senate floor; his party holds the majority while Democrats have 45 seats.

A spokesperson for Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat and a ranking member of the committee, said the timing of the full Senate vote is now in the hands of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican.

Still, Pearce’s path to the nomination faced no shortage of dissent. Environmental groups have long fought with Pearce over his advocacy for the oil and gas industry.

Camilla Feibelman, director of the Rio Grande chapter of the Sierra Club, released a statement Wednesday that said Pearce “supported expanding oil and gas drilling on federal public lands and led the charge to shrink the size of existing national monuments.”

“Americans deserve a trustworthy leader who would prioritize managing our cherished public lands for the good of all, rather than selling them off to polluting corporations,” Feibelman said.

Heinrich voted against Pearce’s nomination, made in November by President Donald Trump.

“Mr. Chairman, I’ve known Congressman Pearce for a long time,” Heinrich said.

For 14 years, Pearce served as the U.S. House representative of New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District. He ran an unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in 2018 and afterward served as the chair of the New Mexico Republican Party.

Pearce and Heinrich, who together served in the U.S. House from 2009 to 2013, clashed over bills to designate the Organ Mountains in Doña Ana County’s Mesilla Valley as a national monument. Former President Barack Obama eventually made the designation in December 2014.

When Pearce testified to the committee last week, “he promised that he would not recommend rolling back national monument designations, something which is extremely important to me,” Heinrich said. Pearce also acknowledged that the agency he wants to lead “cannot conduct large-scale selloffs of public lands under existing law, which is correct.”

Last week, Heinrich, while questioning Pearce, called the fight over the Organ Mountains “water under the bridge” but asked Pearce to reflect on the episode.

In reply, Pearce insisted he would not revisit the issue as BLM director.

“At the end of the day, that’s a presidential decision anyway,” Pearce said of monument designation. “But I don’t view myself as going and making a recommendation. There is too much ahead of us to get done to focus on things that have happened in the past. It’s been recognized, and it’s operating.”

“I intend to hold him to these statements,” Heinrich said during Wednesday’s hearing. “But I also know that commitments to follow the law by previous Trump administration nominees have proven unreliable at times.”

Nonetheless, politics ruled the day.

“These nominees are qualified, capable and ready to serve,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee, Republican chairman of the committee, said of Pearce and other nominees.

Justin Horwath covers tech and energy for the Journal. You can reach him at jhorwath@abqjournal.com.