The Center for Western Priorities has a new report out today that draws links to politicians who support more state and local control of federal lands in their states as extremists by showing the same cause is supported by groups that are politically unpopular for anti-federal-government positions.
The report titled “Going to Extremes: The Anti-Government Extremism Behind the Growing Movement to Seize America’s Public Lands” names Colorado Republican state Sens. Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling and Kent Lambert of Colorado Springs, among other Western legislators.
“The elected officials supporting state seizure of public lands couch their arguments carefully, using innocuous rhetoric to claim that their only goal is better land management. But in reality, these politicians are following directly in the ideological footsteps of Cliven Bundy, the scofflaw rancher who owes more than $1 million in grazing fees to American taxpayers and doesn’t recognize the U.S. government as ‘even existing.'”
...The report linking politicians to extremist groups is built on their support for similar issues, not any formal membership or direct participation in any group’s more radical statements or operations.
I asked the center if this correlation between politicians and activist groups would be any different from associating Democrats who introduce legislation protecting endangered animal species with a group such as the Earth Liberation Front, for example, whose members burned down the Two Elk Lodge near Vail in 1998 over concerns for Canadian lynx habitat.
“They aren’t just supporting similar goals — they’re trying to pass legislation that goes directly to the demands and ideology of the Oath Keepers and Bundy Ranch supporters,” Aaron Weiss, a spokesman for the Center for Western Priorities, responded in an e-mail about the state-control advocates.
“When Kent Lambert mentions ‘posse comitatus’ during a floor debate, that’s a dog whistle to the Oath Keepers — there’s a tiny group of people who even know what the term means, much less cite it during the legislative session.”
Lambert said he hadn’t heard of the Oath Keepers before Tuesday, so it wasn’t a dog whistle but a reference to the “Federalist Papers, No. 29,” a letter from Alexander Hamilton to the people of New York in 1788 to the clarify the role of state militia in enforcing provisions of the Constitution. Further, the often-cited 1878 Posse Comitatus Act limits the federal government’s role in domestic police matters. Lambert’s unsuccessful Senate Bill 39 would have recognized that state and local governments already has jurisdiction over U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands.
I think Senator Lambert pretty well sums it up:
Lambert said the report just seeks to vilify a political point of view the center doesn’t agree with. “If you can’t debate an argument’s merits, then you make ad hominem attacks and try to vilify the message,”...
Calling it a report is a stretch, but you can see it here.
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