It turns out that for all of its chest thumping about the founding fathers and the Constitution, the Freedom Caucus isn’t very keen on the executive or judicial branches exercising their constitutionally endowed powers or performing their legally required duties — at least when such actions run contrary to the far right bloc’s aims.
Faced with inconveniently legal government behavior, the caucus responds with temper tantrums in the halls of Congress and the Capitol in Cheyenne. These lawmakers’ dogmatic dedication to far-right beliefs — positions that endanger public health and safety, and ironically curtail freedoms — further undermines people’s faith in the legitimacy of decisions by public agencies.
The Wyoming Legislature’s budget session demonstrated how far the House Freedom Caucus will go to press its radical agenda. The caucus led the fight to outlaw gun-free zones at schools and most state and local government buildings, a potentially disastrous move vetoed by Gov. Mark Gordon.
With two state abortion bills tied up in court, Gordon also vetoed a Freedom Caucus bill to regulate the state’s only abortion clinic out of existence.
The caucus demanded a special session to reconsider the bills, but fortunately the House voted against it.
This childish “I’m taking my ball and going home” Freedom Caucus strategy is playing out at the federal level, too.
U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., one of the 40-plus members in the U.S. House’s Freedom Caucus, is sponsoring a bill to block the federal plan to manage 3.6 million acres in the high steppe country between the Wind River Range and Rock Springs.
Hageman abhors the Bureau of Land Management’s draft Rock Springs Resource Management Plan because it favors a conservation option. But she doesn’t want it simply changed; Hageman wants to keep the BLM from implementing all future management plans that aren’t industry-friendly. That would violate the Federal Land Policy Management Act, which Congress passed in 1976 to balance conservation and development.
Hageman grossly mischaracterized the plan as “an illegal land grab.” A total of 65% of the minerals estate and 48% of the surface estate in Wyoming is owned by the American public and managed by the federal government.
Pro-industry voices are loud in southwest Wyoming, where stakeholders fear the plan will prevent development of a new trona mine and oil and natural gas drilling, resulting in job losses and lower tax revenues.
But others believe it’s vital to safeguard wildlife, including the world’s richest sage grouse habitat, and migration routes for elk, antelope and mule deer. It would increase protections for the “respected places” of the tribal nations that have traditional homelands in the area.
Far from shutting off public access, as opponents claim, all four of the management plan alternatives considered by the BLM maintained or enhanced access for hunters, ranchers and other public land users.
The final plan is intended to be a hard-fought compromise between competing multiple uses.
Hageman has kept up a steady drumbeat of deliberate misinformation, with the Wyoming House Freedom Caucus adding to the chorus of inflammatory rhetoric. It reached its zenith when state Rep. Bill Allemand, R-Casper, declared the draft plan the worst disaster in American history, “affecting more people than the Civil War, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined.”
It’s no wonder that the BLM’s draft plan was met with hostility at public meetings.
Yes, the plan designates 1.6 million acres as “areas of critical environmental concern,” where new oil and gas leases are banned. But about half of the Rock Springs management area has already been leased for oil and gas, and lands where the BLM proposed to block new leases have low prospects for oil and gas yields.
The plan would keep 1.4 million acres open to oil and gas leasing and development, and not affect hundreds of existing oil and gas wells.
BLM Principal Deputy Director Nada Wolff Culver said Hageman’s bill to halt the BLM’s work “would undermine the public’s right to provide input on the management of public lands, and the BLM’s ability to steward them.”
Last November, Hageman tried to cut the BLM’s budget by half. She claimed the BLM’s Rock Springs plan would “ravage Wyoming’s and the nation’s economy and ultimately destroy opportunities to use the land in a productive, profitable and effective way.”
Hageman also blasted the BLM for creating “so-called conservation leases as a means to simply eliminate other uses and bar anyone from ever setting foot on these lands.”
How far we’ve come — in a wholly negative sense — from the Wyoming Wilderness Act of 1984. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who then held what is now Hageman’s job in Congress, co-wrote the law to prohibit development on 900,000 acres.
“There is a general feeling in my state that much as we would like the economic benefits from the energy resources, we’d like even more to save a few acres and declare them off-limits,” Cheney said.
Cheney still is one of the most conservative men in American politics, but there would be no room for him in today’s Freedom Caucus, where compromise is ridiculed, industry is king and free-thinking has been banished.
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The Drake’s Take is a weekly column by veteran Wyoming journalist Kerry Drake, and produced by WyoFile.com, a nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
