A New Sagebrush Rebellion?

The wolf discussion was actually a facade masking the contentious issue of the management of federal public lands in Idaho (63% of the state) and other Western states. Rex firmly believes that these vast national parks, national monuments, national forests, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) holdings, etc., actually belong to their home states. This states rights argument is rooted in the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and has been hashed-over for a century in the West. When discoursing about this, Rex uses the words "sovereign" and "sovereignty." He tells his sympathetic listeners that if elected, the Department of the Interior and Department of Agriculture -- and other interested federal agencies -- won't have anything to say about the management of those lands, because they will belong to the people of Idaho. By coincidence, Utah governor Gary Herbert is lately considering legal action to attempt to supersede the Interior Department, and encourage private sector energy development on off-limits BLM tracts in Utah. This may be typical local federal-bashing in an election year, or it's another manifestation of our contemporary volatile national political conversation in a bad economy. Either way, it's a throwback to the old Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s...more