How the Freedom Caucus prefers strong-arm tactics to public input

It turns out that for all of its chest thumping about the founding fathers and the Constitution, the Freedom Caucus isn’t very keen on the executive or judicial branches of government exercising their constitutionally endowed powers or performing their legally required duties — at least when such actions run contrary to the far right bloc’s aims.

Faced with inconveniently legal government behavior, the caucus regularly responds with temper tantrums in both the halls of Congress and at the Capitol in Cheyenne. These lawmakers’ dogmatic dedication to far-right beliefs — positions that endanger public health and safety, and ironically curtail freedoms — further undermines people’s faith in the legitimacy of decisions by public agencies.

The Wyoming Legislature’s recent budget session demonstrated how far the House Freedom Caucus is willing to go to press its radical agenda on the entire state. The caucus led the fight to outlaw gun-free zones at schools and most state and local government buildings, a potentially disastrous move fortunately vetoed by Gov. Mark Gordon.

The governor also vetoed a bill brought by lawmakers who were afraid the Wyoming Supreme Court may overturn bans on surgical and medication abortions passed last year. Rather than wait for the court to act, the Freedom Caucus tried to block women’s access to all abortion services by closing down the only clinic in the state that performs the procedures. They were almost successful.

Angered that Gordon will not bend to its political will, and greatly overestimating support from Wyoming voters for its key issues, the Freedom Caucus demanded a special legislative session but failed a vote in the House Sunday night. Caucus members also wanted to override a veto of a way-over-the-top $75 million slush fund lawmakers could use to fight federal land policies in Wyoming.

This childish “I’m taking my ball and going home” Freedom Caucus strategy is playing out at the federal level too. 

U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyoming), one of the 40-plus federal lawmakers in the U.S. House’s Freedom Caucus, is sponsoring a bill to block the long-delayed federal plan to manage 3.6 million acres in the high steppe country between the Wind River Range and Rock Springs. 

Hageman abhors the Bureau of Land Management’s draft Rock Springs Resource Management Plan because it favors a conservation option, and she’s blatantly using it to score political points. But she doesn’t want it simply changed; Hageman wants to keep the BLM from implementing all future management plans that aren’t industry-friendly. That would clearly violate the Federal Land Policy Management Act, which Congress passed in 1976 to balance conservation and development.

The draft plan, released last August, is being revised by the BLM after receiving thousands of public comments from throughout the country. The agency extended the comment period by 60 days until mid-January, after Gordon and others complained it needed more input about economic impacts before finalizing the plan.

Hageman grossly mischaracterized the plan as “an illegal land grab.” The charge is absurd on its face, since the federal land managed by the BLM is owned by all Americans, not just Wyoming residents bent on serving the interests of multinational mining corporations and the cattle industry. A total of 65% of the minerals estate and 48% of the surface estate in Wyoming is owned by the American public and managed by the federal government.

The pro-industry voices are loud in Southwest Wyoming, where some stakeholders fear the BLM’s plan will prevent development of a new trona mine and oil and natural gas drilling, resulting in job losses and lower tax revenues. 

But many others believe it’s vital for the agency to safeguard wildlife, including the world’s richest sage grouse habitat, and migration routes for elk, antelope and mule deer. It would also increase protections for the “respected places” of the tribal nations that have traditional homelands in the areas, and other sensitive resources.

Far from shutting off public access, as opponents claim, all four of the management plan alternatives considered by the BLM maintained or enhanced access for hunters, ranchers and other public land users.

The final plan is intended to be a hard-fought compromise between competing multiple uses. The BLM has worked with several groups, including a special task force appointed by Gordon to meet with BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning. 

Hageman has kept up a steady drumbeat of deliberate misinformation, with the Wyoming House Freedom Caucus adding to the chorus of inflammatory rhetoric. It reached its zenith when state Rep. Bill Allemand (R-Casper) declared the draft plan the worst disaster in American history, “affecting more people than the Civil War, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined.” 

It’s no wonder that the BLM’s draft plan was met with such hostility at public meetings, reportedly leading to threats against agency personnel.

Yes, the plan designates 1.6 million acres as “areas of critical environmental concern,” where new oil and gas leases are banned. But about half of the Rock Springs management area has already been leased for oil and gas, and lands where the BLM proposed to block new leases have low prospects for oil and gas yields.

The plan would keep 1.4 million acres open to oil and gas leasing and development, and it would not affect hundreds of existing oil and gas wells.

Almost 2.5 million acres would be closed to wind and solar development, but such projects could still be deployed on a million acres. A total of 1.8 million acres each would be open for oil shale and trona mining, plus about 225,000 acres for coal mining.

Off-highway vehicles would be banned on about 225,000 acres, but designated OHV routes would be preserved on 3.3 million acres.

Hageman’s claim that grazing leases would be extremely limited is truly laughable. The plan leaves 3.58 million acres — a whopping 99.8% of the planning area — available for livestock grazing.

Does any of this sound like the complete decimation of the mining and livestock industries?

At a recent hearing on Hageman’s bill at the House Subcommittee on Federal Lands, BLM Principal Deputy Director Nada Wolff Culver said the Wyoming congresswoman’s proposal to halt the BLM’s work now “would undermine the public’s right to provide input on the management of public lands, and the BLM’s ability to steward them.”

Hageman keeps making preposterous claims, like she did presenting an amendment last November seeking to cut the BLM’s budget by an outrageous 50%. She said the BLM’s Rock Springs plan would “ravage Wyoming’s and the nation’s economy and ultimately destroy opportunities to use the land in a productive, profitable and effective way.”

Hageman then blasted the BLM for creating “so-called conservation leases as a means to simply eliminate other uses and bar anyone from ever setting foot on these lands.”

How far we’ve come — in a wholly negative sense — from the Wyoming Wilderness Act of 1984. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who then held what is now Hageman’s job in Congress, successfully co-wrote the law to prohibit development in 900,000 acres, including the Gros Ventre Wilderness.

Here’s what Cheney said about what he called his greatest legislative achievement: “There is a general feeling in my state that much as we would like the economic benefits from the energy resources, we’d like even more to save a few acres and declare them off-limits.”

Cheney was one of the most conservative men in American politics, but there would be no room for him in today’s Freedom Caucus, where compromise is ridiculed, industry is king and free-thinking has been banished.