ESA requires real repairs

For the past year and a half, Congress and the Obama administration have become the Mr. Fix-its of politics. They've strapped on their legislative toolbelts and gone to work in the name of "change." They fixed health care -- even though it wasn't needed -- and they fixed Wall Street just in time for those fat executive bonus checks to go out. But one law that is profoundly broken -- and has been since Richard Nixon signed it in 1973 -- has been totally ignored: the Endangered Species Act. The ESA doesn't accomplish its stated goal -- helping to bring back species from the brink of extinction. Since it was passed, 25 species of plants and animals have been delisted -- most because they were put there by mistake. In all 1,375 plants and animals have been put on the list as threatened or endangered. But not helping endangered species is the least of the act's shortcomings. The ESA is the Gordian knot of laws. It creates problems that cannot be solved. In the Klamath Basin, the Columbia and Snake rivers, the Sacramento Delta, and the forests, rangeland and farms of the West environmental extremists use the ESA as a blunt legal instrument to stop economic activity...more

Though the excuse used by the extremists and their lawyers is to "save" salmon, suckers, smelt, wolves, owls, sage grouse and worms, the real, albeit unstated, goal is to stop economic activity they don't support or to shake the federal money tree, or both.