The U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of officially renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America Thursday, and all four of Utah’s House representatives joined the GOP majority to vote in favor of the change.
The bill, H.R. 276, sponsored by Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, passed the House by a vote of 211-206 in a nearly perfect party-line vote. Just a single House Republican, Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, joined with Democrats to vote against the name change first coined by President Donald Trump in an executive order earlier this year.
Utah’s four House GOP representatives — Reps. Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy and Burgess Owens — all voted in favor. None of the four members immediately responded to a request for comment on the bill and their votes in favor.
“The American people are footing the bill to protect and secure the maritime waterways for commerce to be conducted. Our U.S. armed forces protect the area from any military threats from foreign countries,” Taylor Greene said in a statement when she introduced the bill earlier this year. “It’s our Gulf. The rightful name is the Gulf of America, and it’s what the entire world should refer to it as.”
But the change would only apply to how the United States formally refers to the Gulf, not the entire world.
If signed into law, H.R. 276 would require that all federal agencies change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in any “law, map, regulation, document, paper, or other record.” The change, according to a Congressional Budget Office review, would cost less than $500,000 to implement, though House Democrats have raised concerns about the costs for schools, cities and other entities to update textbooks and signage, CBS News reported.
On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order to rename the Gulf, and Greene’s bill aims to give the executive order legislative backing. Neither the order nor Greene‘s bill can compel other countries to adopt the name change.
Despite the president’s backing, it seems unlikely that Greene’s bill will get a vote in the Senate, where it would require at least seven Democrats to break with their party and vote in favor in order to overcome the Senate filibuster. Politico reported Thursday that, asked if the Senate would take up the bill, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he had not considered it yet and added, “Does it take Congress to do that?”
Trump’s move to rename the gulf to the Gulf of America has become central to an ongoing battle with The Associated Press — the news wire service that also sets style standards for much of the U.S. media — as the outlet determined it would not refer to body of water as the Gulf of America, though they note Trump’s change.
“The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years,” the AP says in its Stylebook. “Refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.
Although Trump signed fewer bills into law in his first 100 days than any other president in recent history, he issued 142 executive orders — 100 more than former President Joe Biden did in the same time period, according to an NPR analysis.
Several of Trump’s executive orders have found legislative backing among Utah’s delegation, as Owens is sponsoring a bill that would codify Trump’s executive order related to eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in schools, and Sen. John Curtis has taken up a bill that would, among other things, codify an executive order allowing for increased logging on federal land.
In a recent interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, however, Curtis noted that the bill has backing from some Democrats and is not an exact copy of Trump’s order.
“I point out that we have Senator [Alex] Padilla, the Democrat from California, and Senator [John] Hickenlooper, the Democrat from Colorado, on the bill as co-sponsors, and the reason I do that is because I think they would bristle if it was described as a photocopy of an EO,” the senator said. “There’s a happy place on public lands between the different parties.”
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