Hill Heat

Senate Cloture Vote on Motion to Proceed (H.R. 2347) on BAAJA (S. 5653). Debate begins at 3 pm, vote scheduled for 5:30 pm. First of the two 60-vote-threshold votes required for passage.

11/09/2026 at 03:00PM

Tell the Senate: Strike Title II. Protect Section 106.

The Senate’s permitting bill, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), would gut Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and put the places that tell America’s story at risk: cemeteries, battlefields, sacred sites, and the landmarks where history happened.

For sixty years, the National Historic Preservation Act has helped protect the places that tell America’s stories: Tribal sacred sites, historic neighborhoods, battlefields, burial grounds, landmarks, and the places where ordinary people made extraordinary history.

Now, those protections face one of the gravest threats in their history.

As the Senate prepares to consider legislation that would dismantle the National Historic Preservation Act, 106 Strong is calling Americans to gather at the U.S. Capitol on November 9 to stand for our history, our communities, Tribal Nations, and our right to be heard.

We are 1,000 organizations and Tribal Nations representing more than nine million Americans. We come from every corner of the country, every kind of community, and many different backgrounds. We are united by a simple conviction:

Our history belongs to all of us. No administration or Congress should be able to destroy it without listening to the people whose lives and communities it defines.

On November 9, we will bring that message directly to the nation’s capital. We invite Tribal citizens, preservationists, historians, architects, archaeologists, museum professionals, students, community advocates, and everyone who cares about America’s heritage to join us.

Come to Washington. Bring your colleagues. Bring your friends. Bring the stories of the places you love.

We will gather peacefully, stand together, and call on Congress to reject legislation that weakens protections for America’s historic and cultural places.

RSVP

11/09/2026 at 12:30PM

Join us for an urgent protest to send a message to Senator Schumer and Representative Jeffries: Stop the Dirty Data Center Deal!

Congress is poised to consider legislation that would drive a massive buildout of hyperscale AI data centers and the fossil fuel infrastructure to power them.

The “Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026” rolls back key environmental laws, all but ensuring ensuring that data center and infrastructure projects are approved regardless of community opposition.

Schumer and Jeffries must block this cynical industry-backed effort to force data centers on America.

We’ll start outside of Schumer’s apartment building at 9:00 a.m., after which we’ll walk to Jeffries’ office at 55 Hanson Place arriving at 10:00 a.m.

Event sponsors: New York Communities for Change, Food & Water Watch, Climate Defenders, 350Brooklyn, Indivisible Brooklyn, Climate Families NYC (list in formation)

11/06/2026 at 09:00AM

Join the America the Beautiful For All coalition for a briefing and action session on the Senate industrial expediting bill (S. 5653) and the lame duck Congress.

Hear policy experts from across the coalition share what this bill would do, including what it would change for Tribal consultation, the Clean Water Act, endangered species, public lands, and our ocean. You’ll leave with insights on how we can make our collective action count in the weeks ahead.

Speakers:

• Basia Marcks, PhD, Ocean Defense Initiative: Ocean and marine protection impacts
• Charlie Thayer, National Congress of American Indians (NCAI): National Historic Preservation Act impacts
• Daniel Cordalis, Native American Rights Fund (NARF): Tribal water protections and additional NHPA impacts
• Dan Hartinger, The Wilderness Society: Public lands impacts
• Jewel Tomasula, PhD, Endangered Species Coalition: Endangered Species Act impacts
• Kristine Oblock, Clean Water for All: Clean Water Act impacts

RSVP

11/05/2026 at 04:00PM

We all deserve clean water and a say in what happens in our own backyards. But Congress is fast-tracking a new bill that would severely weaken fundamental environmental laws including the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. Join us for a community call-in action webinar to learn how the so-called “Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act” threatens our communities and how we can rally together to stop this devastating proposal.

RSVP

11/05/2026 at 01:00PM

Free DC co-founder and executive director Keya Chatterjee warns that the industrial-expediting bill BAAJA (S. 5653) would give Trump more power to damage Washington D.C. and the rest of the nation.

“BAAJA is dangerous,” Chatterjee, an experienced climate justice activist, told Hill Heat in a written statement. “Trump just cut down hundreds of trees against a judge’s orders, wants drones and snipers in an arch pointed at where the March on Washington occurred, ran the Kennedy Center finances into the ground which made it shut down, made a mockery and a mess of the reflecting pool and the East Wing, and is egging on the data centers that are driving up electricity prices everywhere. Not a single senator should vote to remove guardrails that are preventing Trump from causing even more damage.”

Chatterjee’s warning about BAAJA’s threat to democracy and environmental justice agrees with other environmental and civil-rights experts and organizations, including Earthjustice president Abigail Dillen, the Detention Watch Network, the NAACP, and veteran climate attorney David Bookbinder.

In a recent public letter, David Bookbinder, one of the nation’s most prominent centrist climate-law experts, described the Senate industrial-expediting bill BAAJA (S. 5653) as “a serious threat to democracy.”

Bookbinder, who has served as chief counsel for the center-right Niskanen Center and for the Sierra Club, and led an independent legal consultancy with former ExxonMobil climate policy manager David Bailey, summarized the legislation thusly:

On the one hand, it makes renewable energy permitting easier and significantly improves federal transmission policy. On the other hand, it makes fossil fuel infrastructure permitting even easier than it has already become, binds future administrations to the energy permitting policies of the Trump administration, seriously weakens the Clean Water Act, and effectively repeals the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Endangered Species Act.

Although he finds fault in every title of the bill, Bookbinder is most concerned by Title IV, “Project Certainty,” which “beggars belief.”

“By placing corporations with any such federal permit not above the law so much as completely beyond its reach,” Bookbinder continued, “these ‘project certainty’ provisions seriously threaten American democracy.”

BAAJA effectively repeals the National Environmental Policy Act: “These measures will make NEPA review largely meaningless, but ultimately that won’t matter because the Bill adds a new judicial review provision making whatever is left of NEPA unenforceable.”

BAAJA Section 1106 provides a “disturbing” runaround of scientific information: “Allowing agencies to ignore scientific evidence while making decisions makes no sense whatsoever, and there is no imaginable rationale for this except as a means of limiting the amount of information an agency must consider.”

BAAJA requires the Trump Council on Environmental Quality to establish rules for an AI-run permitting system within 60 days: “This is a massive task, and the 60-day timeline means that the Trump CEQ has probably already prepared it. It is highly concerning that this CEQ will establish ‘data quality standards’ that will be used to exclude information this administration doesn’t like.”

BAAJA eliminates the Clean Water Act provision used by governors to stop the Jordan Cove LNG export terminal; PennEast natural gas pipeline; and the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) Pipeline.

BAAJA’s extension from 5 to 10 years of certain Clean Water Act permits will “dramatically slow progress in reducing water pollution in states that take [effluent] permitting seriously.”

BAAJA “seriously weakens” the Endangered Species Act.

Section 1304 of BAAJA allows the federal government to transfer responsibilities of protecting an endangered species to any given state; “unless the state has a proven commitment to endangered species, that’s the end of the story.”

BAAJA effectively repeals the National Historic Preservation Act: the federal government “can wave a magic wand and decide to exempt any project from the NHPA and that decision is not reviewable in court.”

Download the full letter.

If enacted, the lame-duck industrial-expediting bill BAAJA (S. 5653) will provide blanket permission for Trump’s destructive wishes in our nation’s capital. In BAAJA Follies, Hill Heat reviews several of the major legal battles against that takeover, and the implications of BAAJA’s possible passage during the lame-duck session.

Beatty v. Trump and DC Preservation League v. Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

If BAAJA passes, the Trump regime will have dangerous new legal tools to permit the threatened demolition of the Kennedy Center.

There are two separate cases against Trump’s renaming and proposed demolition of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts: trustee Rep. Joyce Beatty’s (D-Ohio) suit, and the DC Preservation League’s case, which are being coordinated but handled separately by Judge Christopher R. Cooper.

Beatty’s suit challenges the renaming of the center after Trump and its arbitrary closure, whereas the coalition of historic preservationists and architects led by the Preservation League seeks to stop Trump from “proceeding with any demolition, new construction, major reconstruction, major renovation, or major aesthetic transformation of the Kennedy Center buildings or grounds that exceeds statutory limits, circumvents mandatory federal review, or fails to comply with fundamental historic preservation and environmental laws.”

The Trump-picked board, with Trump as chair, has repeated voted to put Trump’s name on the building and close down the center. In May, when the judge ordered the name removed and the center reopened, the board relented on the name. But then the board voted again to put Trump’s name on the building and to close down the center, claiming it was in a state of extreme disrepair, so the judge issued another injunction in September against any renaming and ordered status reports on the purported repair effort while the center remains closed.

The DC Preservation League case would be severely weakened by BAAJA, as its first two and eighth counts rely on Section 106 of NHPA, and its third count on NEPA. Furthermore, the passage of BAAJA would greatly strengthen the Trump regime’s claim that the plaintiffs lack standing to sue.

BAAJA’s provisions would radically empower Trump to commence demolition without public consultation, under the guise of Congressionally appropriated renovations and repairs.

“Unless the NHPA provisions are fully removed from the permitting bill, the President will have virtually free rein to implement his pet projects in DC and nationwide, with no input from the public,” Greg Werkheiser, a lawyer representing the Preservation League, warned in a written interview with Hill Heat. Werkheiser questioned why Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who has been investigating Trump’s corrupt mismanagement of the Kennedy Center, is now “gutting the law that slows him down.”

As written, S. 5653 (BAAJA) would hamper, if not altogether thwart, critical work by civil rights organizations to halt U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) dangerous expansion of immigrant detention, the Detention Watch Network warned today. It would, instead, accelerate ICE’s deadly warehousing of Americans.

The Detention Watch Network is a national coalition fighting to end immigrant detention, and ICE’s inability to respect laws protecting nature from industrial destruction has allowed the network to stop their rapid conversion of warehouses into detention camps, which is backed by $45 billion from the One Big Brutal Bill Act (OBBBA).

“The lack of environmental review provided the essential basis for states and communities across the country to challenge ICE’s plans, resulting in NEPA lawsuits filed by the states of Arizona, Maryland, Michigan, and New Jersey; and cities in Texas, Georgia, and Utah,” explains the network. “In April, the state of Maryland won a preliminary injunction blocking ICE from proceeding with construction because of the lack of compliance with NEPA. As a direct result of that victory and others in similar lawsuits, ICE’s plans in Maryland and other states quickly stalled.”

However, if BAAJA passes, those laws limiting industrial construction would be effectively eliminated and the warehousing will recommence.

“In the future, ICE could proceed with massive, irreversible projects like the warehouse detention expansion project with little oversight and no meaningful legal recourse,” the network writes.

“If NEPA becomes utterly toothless, as it would under BAAJA,” Earthjustice president Abigail Dillen earlier criticized, “I wonder how state Attorneys General and our lawyers at Earthjustice could stop ICE from detaining thousands of people in Amazon-style warehouses as we have so far been able to do.”

UPDATE 11/4: Detention Watch Network has launched a letter campaign calling on Congress “to oppose BAAJA as written and protect communities’ ability to stop detention expansion.”

Read the letter

Join us to Protect the Point with a Halloween twist!

Hains Point Hoopla 4.0

Tree stumps and buzzsaws, expensive golf, no space for running, biking, picnics, or fishing. Spooky, right? That’s not the future we envision for our beloved East Potomac Park. Hains Point is threatened by Trump and by Congress, which is planning to pass BAAJA to kill the public’s ability to stop Trump’s plans.

Join us for yet another Hains Point Hoopla with a special Halloween-twist to scream for protections for East Potomac Park. Costumes encouraged!

Come to hear the latest news from the lawsuit to protect East Potomac Park and to celebrate the Hains Point community at Hains Point Hoopla 4.0 on Saturday, October 31st at 10 am. (Meet for a bike/run parade with DC Activist Street Band at 9:30 at Smithsonian Metro near Independence Ave!)

Part 1: 9:30am – Slow Roll to Hains Point with the DC Activist Street Band [optional]. Meet at Smithsonian Metro near Independence Ave. From there, the group will bike or run with the DC Activist Street Band about 2.8-miles to Hains Point.

Part 2: 10:00am – Rally at Hains Point in East Potomac Park. The gathering will take place on the mixed-use field adjacent to Ohio Drive just past the entrance to the parking lot for the picnic area.

We’re holding the line: Hains Point should be for people! We need a future for the park (with trees!) that continues to support all visitors who enjoy the public space.

This event is led by WABA with support from Save East Po, 50501DC, and the DC Preservation League.

Sign the petition to Save Hains Point for People!

Check out WABA’s new Hands Off Hains Point tshirts and hoodies! A portion of the proceeds will go to the DC Preservation League to support their lawsuit to keep Hains Point open for everyone.

Protect East Potomac Park: Tell Congress to stop BAAJA.

10/31/2026 at 09:30AM