Tread lightly on our public land, politicians!

Even smart politicians make stupid mistakes. That’s how they lose political power; that’s how they get un-elected.

Here’s how it happens. An elected official deludes himself or herself into thinking they are unassailable, that their seat is safe because they’ve never been seriously challenged. This is political hubris and leads to mistakes. They finally cross a line, push the envelope too far and run into political Kryptonite.

Those officials’ hubris reaches the point where they tell their constituents, “We don’t give a rat’s ass what you think, we’re gonna do what we want.” This attitude toward their jobs and their constituents is the graveyard of political ambition.

All three members of our Wyoming congressional delegation are smart politicians. Their election records bear this out. But they are going down a path that will end up in their political doom. So we should give them fair warning.

Perhaps the clearest warning that our delegation could receive is a reminder of what happened to U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, an outcome that they themselves, to one extent or another, contributed to. Cheney’s seat seemed secure and her popularity bulletproof until she acted in a way that was intolerable to Wyoming’s electorate. Voters turned on Cheney as quickly as a striking rattlesnake, and her political career in the Cowboy State came to an abrupt end.

U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, and Rep. Harriet Hageman, through their unwavering support for Trump, seemingly enjoy secure places in Wyoming politics. But if they slavishly follow Trump in his zeal to sell public lands in the West, they’ll face a political firestorm every bit as hot as the one that scorched Cheney.

Maybe they misread the room and don’t grasp how their constituents feel about the half of the Big Empty that is in public lands. Sure, we cuss federal land management agencies up one side and down the other. We were taught that by our parents and grandparents. But they also taught us that we can hunt, fish, camp, rockhound and generally goof around on our public land without having to beg permission from anyone.

The public domain in Wyoming is interwoven into the fabric of our land ethic, an ethic that is passed down from one generation to another. It is, quite simply, how we think of ourselves and the landscape around us. It’s how we think of our home.

When politicians — whether our own representatives or an eastern businessman like Trump — try to tell us that we are wrong, then we get pissed off. When they say that large swaths of our home should be sold to the highest bidder, our bullshit detectors go off and our hackles go up. And then we vote. Just ask Cheney.

The public land issue cuts across partisan boundaries and bridges demographics in Wyoming. It is where the right wing and the left wing meet on common ground. For a politician to ignore or discount the depth of this ethos in the electorate is a grave mistake. To call it a silly overreaction is political suicide.

I think our delegation is feeling the hot blast of pushback against Trump’s misguided notion of disposing of public land in Wyoming. And that pushback is coming from folks who, up until now, thought our delegation could do no wrong. I think it’s dawning on them that this is a Rubicon they can’t cross if they want to keep their election certificates.

It will be instructive to watch how the delegation deals with this crisis.

I’d suggest that they pay close attention to the rally that will be held at the Wyoming Capitol at 6 p.m., Thursday. They should keep a head count of the number of their constituents protesting the sale of our public land and compare that with the number of Wyomingites carrying signs that say, “Hell yeah. Sell it all.”

If they can’t read the room, and they call the protest a silly overreaction, I guess they can wait to look at the numbers in the next election. The choice is theirs.

But smart politicians who can sense their neighbors’ anger, and who are willing to stand their ground against bone-headed ideas like privatizing Wyoming’s public land, can smell political blood in the water. They’re flexing their muscles to run against our complacent incumbents. Here endeth the lesson.