Oklahoma vs. the West

The biggest piece of environmental legislation in decades -- the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009 -- might have been "of 2008," or been passed in various forms even earlier, were it not for Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn. The Omnibus Act bundled 164 conservation efforts into a massive package that designated 2 million acres of new wilderness and increased the wild and scenic river system by 50 percent. It helped enable buyouts of oil and gas leases in Wyoming's Bridger-Teton National Forest and ratified wilderness deals that were negotiated on the ground in Idaho's Owyhee County and Utah's Washington County. Many Western environmentalists, ranchers, county officials and other stakeholders were involved in creating the Omnibus. But the act itself can be blamed on Coburn, which is why it's known around Capitol Hill as "Tomnibus." "What he did was put holds on virtually every bill that came out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee," says Paul Spitler, a high-ranking Wilderness Society staffer based in Washington, D.C. Coburn blocked so many individual bills in 2008 that supporters decided to lump them together into the omnibus package in early 2009, hoping to pass all 164 measures at once. They succeeded, but not without a fight. At Coburn's insistence, the Omnibus Act was "read (on the Senate floor) until the wee hours of the morning, which dragged out the timeline for an extra day," says Spitler. "And at that point, he said, ‘OK, you guys can go home now.' " Coburn again drew the ire of Western environmentalists in September, by holding up passage of five popular wildlife-protection bills, one of which -- the Crane Conservation Act -- was sponsored by a fellow Republican, Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo...more