The 41-day armed takeover of an Oregon wildlife refuge has underscored fears that a new rebellion against federal authority is brewing in the West.
Veterans of public land fights in the 1970s see signs of a new Sagebrush -Rebellion, the name given to an at-times violent movement aimed at prying land away from the federal government and giving it to states and private owners.
{mosads}William Perry Pendley, who wrote a book on the movement, directly links Obama’s climate change policies to the possibility of a new rebellion.
“It’s back today because President Obama’s governing like Jimmy Carter did. And it’s even worse, because you’ve got the war on coal, which is just devastating to places like Utah and Wyoming,” he said.
Pendley said the modern Sagebrush Rebellion will likely continue to grow if the next president doesn’t take their cause seriously, and he’s not optimistic the front-runners for either party, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, will be the answer.
There’s little doubt that Obama’s environmental push is a factor in the anger out West.
But critics say Obama’s policies aren’t any more adversarial to the region than his predecessors.
They link the new troubles out West, reflected both in the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the 2014 standoff at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Nevada, to worries about the nation’s economic future and government intervention that have fueled the Tea Party movement and Donald Trump’s presidential run.
“That’s a completely baseless accusation,” said David Hayes, a Stanford Law School lecturer and deputy secretary of the Interior from 2009 to 2013.
“Everywhere you look, you see an administration that absolutely respects the culture of the West and the important role of public lands in the communities and has worked through issues with those values in mind.”
Hayes said anger from the rural West at Washington is a decades-old issue.
“What’s different this time is that a fringe group has literally taken up arms and acted in the most non-democratic and un-American way possible.”
The movement’s arguments boil down to a few ideas.
Some believe that the Constitution and the laws creating individual Western states prohibit such expansive land ownership by the feds. Others say the states, local government
or individuals can take better care of the land. And some simply believe it’s unfair for so many Western states to have federal land while Eastern states have much less.
Ken Ivory, a Republican state lawmaker in Utah, founded the American Lands Council to push state efforts to take control of federal land.
“You’ve got a fundamental inequity and unfairness. Communities and individual ranchers and individual people throughout the West are being denied that fundamental promise by their own government,” he said. “That’s creating a heightened sense of frustration.”
Opponents don’t buy it.
“They’re wrong about the Constitution, which explicitly gives Congress authority over these lands,” Hayes said.
“There’s been a fairly steady minority view on this point for many years. And I expect that it continue to be a minority point. Because most Americans appreciate our public lands and support common ownership and management of our public lands,” he said.
The end of the Oregon occupation started with a traffic stop near the refuge.
It culminated in a firefight that left Robert “LaVoy” Finicum dead after officers shot him and Ryan Bundy, one of Cliven Bundy’s sons.
Congressional Republicans say the violence has the potential to hurt their message.
“It doesn’t help, that’s for sure,” Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) said in an interview at the Capitol.
Stewart leads the Federal Land Action Group, which was launched last year to explore ways to reduce federal land ownership.
“I’ve said to people a number of times: If you have a protest or a rally, we’re going to support you on that,” he said. “If you invite people with guns to that, it’s not a protest anymore, it’s something different. And you lose a lot of support from people who think this is a problem.”
Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), long an opponent of federal ownership of so much land, also said it hurt the effort to win more private and state land ownership.
“I think it does hurt it, temporarily at least,” said Lummis.
“When it appears that extremists don’t respect the rule of law and are not willing to work through appropriate channels to have a legitimate discussion, it does hurt the legitimate discussion. I’m hopeful that, when the dust settles, we can once again re-engage in a legitimate discussion about the future of federal land management.”
Many Democrats believe the government took too long to crack down in Oregon.
“I’m very glad that the crackdown happened,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), a member of the House Natural Resources Committee.
“You could argue that it happened too late and that it was too loose for too long. But if this had been allowed to become like Bundy Ranch, where this active insurrection and violence and intimidation was not met with any accountability or consequence, I think we could have more problems all over the West, if not all over the country.”
The Nevada standoff at the Bundy ranch came in April 2014, when federal officials tried to remove Bundy’s cattle after he had racked up more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees and charges.
Armed supporters from the county came to the ranch, threatening violence against the federal agents. The government backed down.
Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) railed against the Justice Department for not interceding earlier.
“I still feel very strongly that if Justice had prosecuted Cliven Bundy a year or a year and a half ago, that Malheur wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “I don’t believe that it was necessary to take two years to develop a case against a guy who supported armed rebellion against the United States.”
Malheur, the refuge in Oregon, opened in March, just in time for birds to migrate through the park. Crews are working to repair the extensive damage to buildings from the occupation.
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Michael Connor, her deputy, visited the area last month. Asked about a resurgence of the Sagebrush Rebellion, Jewell said she knows it’s a threat, and she knows it’s hard for the federal government to fight the public relations war against the activists.
“Fear is very easy to sell. It’s simple; it oversimplifies complexity. And I think we’ve seen a portion of our population that’s reacting to these messages,” she said.
“But it is real life. It’s a fact that things need to be in good balance. And it’s harder to communicate. It doesn’t lend itself to a quick social media hit.”