Ted Cruz aims to win the West

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is making a play for the West in the 2016 race by touting his opposition to the federal government’s expansive land holdings. Cruz’s disdain for federal land control is resonating with Westerners whose lives are impacted by land managers, and could help him win over conservatives in Nevada, one of the early nominating states in the presidential contest. “This is an issue he’s been focused on for quite some time, and it’s one that plays extremely well with the conservative base in the western part of the United States,” said Ford O’Connell, a GOP strategist who advised the 2008 presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) Federal control is particularly heavy in Nevada, where the government owns 81 percent of all land, the most of any state. “This is something that has been a perennial issue in the West since it became part of the United States,” said James McCarthy, a geography professor at Clark University who studies the history of western land. “It’s a staple of western politics to complain about that.” O’Connell said Nevada is especially receptive to issues of land rights, and said opposing federal control could play “extremely well” there for Cruz. “He really needs to get some traction, because he’s lingering in the polls, and he needs some elbow room in this potentially crowded field,” he said. Nevada could be critical for the senator, as it traditionally follows Iowa and New Hampshire in the early stretch of nominating states. It was third on the GOP presidential calendar in 2012, and is tentatively scheduled to be fourth in 2016. Early polling indicates Cruz has a real shot in the state.  Should the senator seek to build a firewall for his campaign in Nevada, he could tout his work on land issues in the Senate, such as his sponsorship of amendments that would prohibit the Interior Department and Forest Service from owning more than half the land in any state.  He has also fought against the Bureau of Land Management’s attempts to claim 90,000 acres of disputed land near Texas’s Red River, and urged his colleagues to vote against last year’s defense authorization bill because of provisions that he called an “extreme land grab.”...more

The article closes with this smug last comment by the good professor who "who studies the history of western land."

Still, in a primary process where big promises are expected, McCarthy, the historian, said Cruz might have little to lose by calling for a wholesale transfer of federal lands away from the federal government.  “It will help him in the primaries there, but he’ll never have to deliver on it,” he said. (emphasis mine)

Really?  Let's say a President Cruz would appoint Utah State Representative Ken Ivory as Secretary of Interior.  Would the good professor believe it would be delivered then?  For those who haven't been paying attention, Rep. Ivory quarterbacked the Utah Transfer Of Public Lands Act through their legislature, and as President of the American Lands Council is educating other states and the general public on a reasonable and responsible transfer program.

With every day that Obama is in office and with every new national monument or other restriction on access to federal lands that his administration imposes, the more politically palatable the partial transfer of these lands become.  At the rate Obama is going, it will be those who favor retention who will be on the political defensive.

And should such a transfer occur, one of the great benefits would be we no longer have to listen to a professor at a university in Massachusetts (a state where the feds own less than 2% of the land area) lecture us on how to run our business.